AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL

AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.

Thank you, AlmaLinux team. It is truly an unfortunate sight to see so many corpo-apologists in a Linux sub. You're doing a beautiful work.

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If there’s anyone that hates what Red Hat has done here, it’s me, but what AlmaLinux is doing is exactly what Red Hat was aiming for according to their statement, which is that clones would use CentOS Stream as their upstream and develop and contribute their own patches instead of copying RHEL bug-for-bug. The other reason is of course to convert people that need that bug-for-bug clone to paying customers.

With SUSE having announced a RHEL compatible alternative, I’m hoping that some people/businesses will consider switching their environment over to them as a more OSS friendly competitor that also offers support. If that distribution gains some traction, I foresee that some of the clones might use that as their upstream and that OEMs will follow suit and test their drivers on those distributions. There are enough people/businesses that are reliant on a mixture of RHEL and Alma/Rocky and for those life got a bit harder because of RHEL’s actions.

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- With SUSE having announced a RHEL compatible alternative,
  
  Bummer. I know there's a market for customers who want it, but I'd prefer to finally rip the bandaid off and just leave RHEL compatibility behind.
  
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This seems like a wise move for the time being. I am an Alma fan and supporter so I get that the foundation is trying to do everything it can to stay relevant.

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Good for Alma, I say. Why base your business model on RedHat not finding a way to kill it? RedHat is a de facto enterprise standard in part because of the existence of free source-rebuild distributions allowing for small FOSS developers to ensure compatibility. They said so themselves, they want users to either switch to another distribution or pay for RedHat. So let's give them what they want and abandon RHEL compatibility.

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Won't Rocky have the same issue as Alma? RedHat has made RHEL closed source, so how can they maintain compatibility?

I suspect Rocky and other source rebuilds just haven't made the announcement yet. Alma was merely the first to make an official statement.

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- Rocky has announced their plan to continue as a 1:1 source rebuild. They're looking at using sources from RedHat's Universal Base Image Docker images, and also using cloud instances with consumption based pricing. With the latter option you spin up an instance on AWS/Azure/DigitalOcean/etc and it has a license for that instance, so you get the sources for the package versions on that instance. But since the license was temporary, then there's nothing for RHEL to terminate when you redistribute the sources.
  
  RedHat says they don't want clones of RHEL. I say give it to them, lets have a landscape where they're no longer the de facto standard because there are no other distributions targeting RHEL compatibility.
  
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- RedHat has made RHEL closed source,
  
  You've said the words, corpo-apologists will start haunting you now, good luck fending them off.
  
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Welp. In rocky we trust to keep it 1 to 1 I guess

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They better be careful, Papa Red Hat is coming after them next. Expect legal issues to unfold in the upcoming months.

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- Yeah precidents are about to get set
  
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I wonder then how PCI compliance will be effected. Given CVEs can be patched by Alma now, however they'll need to maintain their own list of CVE's to track/fix

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You should be fine for PCI compliance as long as you are on a current release (Been there already, a few times). Also AlmaLinux already has an Announce mailing list (announce@lists.almalinux.org) where they release update notifications (including Security releases) just like CentOS did.

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Whole situation is ridiculous. People can't expect enterprise features and support infrastructure for free. But enterprises need to offer more price tiers.

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I always thought the Red Hat business model was based around service and support with the OS being a secondary product which is why the free forks existed. When did the OS become the product?

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- When did the OS become the product?
  
  When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source RPMs with trademarks removed.and selling support contracts for it. Oracle being the absolute worst about it. Fuck Oracle.
  
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People can’t expect enterprise features [...] for free

Hmm? Does Red Hat have *anything* you couldn't install in *any* linux distro?

support infrastructure for free

Alma sells support IIRC don't they? Or are you saying we need to fire all Windows IT specialists that are not Microsoft employees?

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- Does Red Hat have anything you couldn't install in any linux distro?
  
  Can you install Satellite servers on your fleet of Ubuntu machines? OpenShift isn't free. I don't think there's anything that RHEL does that any other enterprise vendor can't do. And I don't support Red Hat (IBM) closing access to the source RPMs. But it costs money for vendors to develop their enterprise management platforms, the storage and bandwidth for geo-cached mirrors of updates, and all that. And if you're in an organization with a fleet of thousands of installations you need enterprise management platform.
  
  Alma sells support IIRC don't they?
  
  Exactly. It costs Alma money to have the resources to do that. So customers will need to pay the support costs to keep Alma viable. Just like with RedHat. But enterprises a freaking out about needing a new free enterprise distro, because RH is too expensive to license on thousands of machines. So RH should be finding more flexible price models, instead of trying to squeeze out competition.
  
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- Maybe you should read the rest of my comments in this post.
  
  You mean enterprise features mostly developed by the community under the GPL?
  
  Enterprise features like the update management server to keep a fleet of thousands of machines patched with only security updates. Infrastructure like geo-located mirrors of the update repositories (not volunteer mirrors like universities around the world mirroring kernel.org and centos.org and eclipse.org etc). Support service like on-call staff to pick up the phone whenever you call. Those things cost money to provide. If you know of a distribution which provides all that for free, please let me know. If you need that level of support, pay for it instead of trying to find a freebie around it.
  
  Why shouldn’t they be free?
  
  I assume you like to be paid for your work. You might be surprised to learn that revenues from that commercial support pay for the free stuff.
  
  Red Hat is not owed our money just because they’re a business, they however do owe the community strict adherence to the GPL and if they’re not downright violating it here, they are most certainly trying to do an end-run around it.
  
  I agree with you, and everyone else who thinks I need to be told this. Which is why I've been advocating in this thread for users to drop RedHat like I did 20ish years ago when they first replaced their free desktop with RedHat Enterprise. And further to move away from source-rebuild distributions because RedHat has clearly stated that they see these users as lost revenue and are taking these actions as a way to "claim" those customers by removing the options. And I certainly wouldn't pay RedHat after shitting on at least the spirit of the GPL (and I'll be happy if someone sues them successfully to set a precedent about the letter of the GPL).
  
  It seems that you, and many other corpo-apologists, have been brainwashed into a commercial software mode of thinking where you get the basic software for free, and then pay for extra features. Your “price tiers” remark certainly indicates that you don’t really understand what open source software is about.
  
  I'm so apologetic to these corporations that I'm literally commenting in here to stop buying from them! Such an apologist! When RedHat killed CentOS, I recommended at my office that we switch all CentOS usage to Ubuntu. When they announced this last move of closing the RHEL source to non-customers and the user agreements that they'll terminate your contract if you distribute the sources, I recommended we don't even consider a source rebuild distribution either, because I don't want us to be caught with having to transition to another distribution if RedHat finds a way to kill off the source for UBI to non-customers (how Rocky is planning to stay compatible as a source-rebuild distribution). And it seems Canonical is killing their free distribution too, for organizations of more than 5, so I have to reconsider Ubuntu now (which sucks because WSL was really helping my case to use Ubuntu) Maybe now that Alma is moving away from the RHEL source rebuild model I can recommend Alma, maybe can get a WSL package of Alma. If the other distributions stop caring about RHEL compatibility, then RHEL will cease to be the de facto standard. And we can all rejoice. Seriously why would anyone want to sell a product they built on RHEL now. If they have to redistribute a library they got from RHEL, then they are faced with either being in violation of GPL or losing access to security updates from RHEL (meaning they'll be exposing their own customers to security risks). It's a legal lose-lose to be a RHEL customer now.
  
  As for support infrastructure: nobody is expecting Red Hat to give tech support to AlmaLinux and RockyLinux users.
  
  Fucking duh. I never implied that. I said if you're trying to make use of enterprise features that cost money to provide, you should pay for them. I personally get by just fine with support from GitHub issues/discussions, Gitter/Slack channels, IRC, and Usenet.
  
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