The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

The Ghost of Kviv said:
Besides IBM's corporate influence was the biggest concern in the aquisition, and the fears expressed are what's happening to a T. The optimist in me hopes that this will usher a shift away from corporate-sponsored distros and back to the likes of Debian and Gentoo.
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Who do you think RHEL's customers are? Debian and Gentoo are DOA as enterprise solutions. Here in Big Corporate America, we need solutions that work, not ones that conform to some toejam-eating weirdo's ideology. RHEL's been a great solution, and their business model worked, turning Red Hat into a billion-dollar business. Some idiot at IBM thinks they can monetize all these CentOS users, but, uh, you built yourself a GPL operating system, kiddo. They can develop their own closed-source POSIX operating system if they want to. The problem is, if there were money in that, Linux wouldn't have killed off all those Unix distros everyone was making in the 90s. All IBM has done so far is get CentOS users to switch to Rocky, and I think it would be hilarious if their next act is to get RHEL users to switch to SLES or something.
 
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The Ugly One said:
Who do you think RHEL's customers are? Debian and Gentoo are DOA as enterprise solutions. Here in Big Corporate America, we need solutions that work, not ones that conform to some toejam-eating weirdo's ideology. RHEL's been a great solution, and their business model worked, turning Red Hat into a billion-dollar business. Some idiot at IBM thinks they can monetize all these CentOS users, but, uh, you built yourself a GPL operating system, kiddo. They can develop their own closed-source POSIX operating system if they want to. The problem is, if there were money in that, Linux wouldn't have killed off all those Unix distros everyone was making in the 90s. All IBM has done so far is get CentOS users to switch to Rocky, and I think it would be hilarious if their next act is to get RHEL users to switch to SLES or something.
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CentOS and Rocky are used for servers and special computers, right? I vaguely remember going to a lab that had a Cray Supercomputer running CentOS
 
Betonhaus said:
CentOS and Rocky are used for servers and special computers, right? I vaguely remember going to a lab that had a Cray Supercomputer running CentOS
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All computers are special. Don't be a computerist.

CentOS and Rocky are more common on servers, but you could use them as a desktop, just like RHEL.
 
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davids877 said:
CentOS and Rocky are more common on servers, but you could use them as a desktop, just like RHEL.
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I don't really know anyone that uses RHEL as a desktop.

You could, but then you'd have to enable EPEL and RPMFusion and then you're kinda in the weeds there and defeating the purpose.
 
The Ugly One said:
Who do you think RHEL's customers are? Debian and Gentoo are DOA as enterprise solutions. Here in Big Corporate America, we need solutions that work, not ones that conform to some toejam-eating weirdo's ideology. RHEL's been a great solution, and their business model worked, turning Red Hat into a billion-dollar business. Some idiot at IBM thinks they can monetize all these CentOS users, but, uh, you built yourself a GPL operating system, kiddo. They can develop their own closed-source POSIX operating system if they want to. The problem is, if there were money in that, Linux wouldn't have killed off all those Unix distros everyone was making in the 90s. All IBM has done so far is get CentOS users to switch to Rocky, and I think it would be hilarious if their next act is to get RHEL users to switch to SLES or something.
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Switch your entire infrastructure off a bug-for-bug high stability distro to another one or eat the licensing fee. Which is cheaper? You said Big Corporate America yourself, not Broke Ass Nigger Shed. Small businesses might as well switch, Debian or whatever doesn't really matter in that case.

I'd also like to know how you think IBM/Red Hat is breaking the GPL licensing by doing this. They do distribute sources to their users, a.k.a. paying clients.
 
Betonhaus said:
CentOS and Rocky are used for servers and special computers, right? I vaguely remember going to a lab that had a Cray Supercomputer running CentOS
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CentOS and Rocky are RHEL clones, and yes, it's mainly used for servers. It's functional as a desktop OS, but I developed in a CentOS environment for years and hated every minute of it.

GNU Abyss said:
I'd also like to know how you think IBM/Red Hat is breaking the GPL licensing by doing this. They do distribute sources to their users, a.k.a. paying clients.
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They have added a TOS stating that their clients can't redistribute the source.

More spergery before you come back with "it's not technically a restriction":

I don't think it's ever been tested in court. There's also the "written offer" clause of GPL v2.
 
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The Ugly One said:
I don't think it's ever been tested in court. There's also the "written offer" clause of GPL v2.
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Unless someone with standing to raise the issue feels like dumping a few mil into it, nothing will happen.

Of course, if someone did, it could make that SCO shit look like a tempest in a teapot.
 
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The Ugly One said:
I don't think it's ever been tested in court. There's also the "written offer" clause of GPL v2.
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Nobody seems to be interested in taking them to court or even busting out the written offer clause.

Amazon's off eating glue in a corner. Oracle is trying to be the good guy. SuSE is creating a RHEL clone for some reason. I don't know what the fuck is going on here to be honest.
 
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The impression I get is that Red Hat is trying to "standardize," as a process to increase market share. Realistically this may be necessary to defeat the Windows monopoly.
 
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Rusty Metal Skull Gun said:
But RHEL is targeting servers, where Windows doesn't have anything remotely close to a monopoly.
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That's fair. So to ensure consistency and good customer support by encouraging customers to use their distro and not others?

The impression I get is that Linux is currently consolidating into specific distros for specific tasks, with many of the forks only being good for individual use. While the massive choices available are nice, generally the few primary distros should be the ones most people use - unless the developers are on a power trip and it's time to fork.

At this point I think I'm happy using Zorin OS for my desktops. My htpc/server is running Kubuntu as it gives it a bit more flexibility, but I could look into putting a more proper server OS on it. Seems in 2021 RHEL was free for use it you had less then 16 systems, but I'm not seeing that on their website.
 
Betonhaus said:
That's fair. So to ensure consistency and good customer support by encouraging customers to use their distro and not others?

The impression I get is that Linux is currently consolidating into specific distros for specific tasks, with many of the forks only being good for individual use. While the massive choices available are nice, generally the few primary distros should be the ones most people use - unless the developers are on a power trip and it's time to fork.

At this point I think I'm happy using Zorin OS for my desktops. My htpc/server is running Kubuntu as it gives it a bit more flexibility, but I could look into putting a more proper server OS on it. Seems in 2021 RHEL was free for use it you had less then 16 systems, but I'm not seeing that on their website.
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RHEL for Individual developers still exists, I think:

Join the developer program and download.

More and more server crap is moving towards containers, which means the underlying server OS is becoming less and less relevant as the developers can use whatever Base OS/Libraries and other crap they want in the container.

Personally I just use Debian for everything, desktop and server. But I also remember when Deb-Ian began.
 
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davids877 said:
More and more server crap is moving towards containers, which means the underlying server OS is becoming less and less relevant as the developers can use whatever Base OS/Libraries and other crap they want in the container.
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Canonical, Red Hat and SuSE are all pushing containers with an immutable core super heavy. I think this is probably the future of Linux.

Anyway RIP OpenSuSE Leap, you just worked and were good well except if you tried to build modules against the kernel because they backported everything into a kernel as old as Jesus, but hey!
 
davids877 said:
RHEL for Individual developers still exists, I think:

Join the developer program and download.

More and more server crap is moving towards containers, which means the underlying server OS is becoming less and less relevant as the developers can use whatever Base OS/Libraries and other crap they want in the container.

Personally I just use Debian for everything, desktop and server. But I also remember when Deb-Ian began.
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Yeah i'll poke about with Red hat in a vm to see if i can set it up to run the way I want it to. Registering an account effectively means using my legal identity which i'm a little squeamish about, but it will cause far less headaches then using an identity that I don't want cross contaminated. And since the server will be used for personal/family use i might as well
 
The Ugly One said:
I don't think it's ever been tested in court. There's also the "written offer" clause of GPL v2.
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Those who could challenge it in court don't give a shit about plebs or what they have access to. I think it's also an inevitable course of action for a company that centers its business model around something everybody can take and use for free. Some more analysis, this time by SFC. Naturally, I do want Red Hat to burn, if only so the constant stream of Poetterware-lite stops for a little while. Keeping my hope alive.
 
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