Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by reacharavindh on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:29AM (#36517857)

Honestly, I’m tired of this. We were going to use Rockylinux as a base for the new version of our research cluster at a University used by researchers from all over the world. We are a tightly funded shop with money allocated as parts of research grants. We were running off of CentOS because a few tools that researchers use were built “for” RHEL by the commercial vendors. Since Redhat now considers users of CentOS “freeloaders” and “leeches”, we have to move on to a better distribution that doesn’t have greedy commercial interests and works with the open source community in the spirit of open source including redistribution freedom. To be fair, even though we were using CentOS at no cost, we have reported a fair share of bugs to RH that I hope to believe benefited the overall community.

We have settled on making the effort to move to Debian for the compute nodes.

One thing we could not break out of is FreeIPA :-( We are not brave enough to run FreeIPA on Debian or find a completely new alternative in Debian that wouldn’t break us while we are already changing so much. So, we are going to pay for RHEL for one server to run IDM.

I will tell the researchers that come to us needing RHEL compatibility to pay for RH license out of their research grants, or spend the time and work with me to make their stuff work on Debian(I can already see what choice they will make).

I hope the fine folks and management gurus at IBM/RH rejoice with their short term profit at the cost of long term loss of faith and ruin.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by nuker on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:39AM (#36517917)

> We have settled on making the effort to move to Debian for the compute nodes.

I’d donate to Rocky and stick with it, if it were my project.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by reacharavindh on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:11AM (#36518129)

I would happily donate to Rocky if I thought it would really sustain it. But, honestly, they are too dependent on RH and finding ways to subvert their restrictions (and considering RH is pretty boldly clear that they dont want to give away the sources) makes it a whack-a-mole game that is not sustainable in my opinion. Been burnt with CentOS 8 once, and I'm not willing to go through it again. Atleast I know Debian wont go this way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by nuker on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:31AM (#36518263)

> But, honestly, they are too dependent on RH …

With enough support Rocky may grow by itself, without RH code. Like what is happening with OpenSearch and Elastic, and OPNsense and pfSense. And my gut feeling is that will happen.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by redeeman on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:17AM (#36518170)

> We are not brave enough to run FreeIPA on Debian

are these redhat projects really so crappy that it is something to be scared about to attempt to simply run them on another linux distribution?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by reacharavindh on Friday June 30, 2023 @06:36AM (#36532682)

Not that freeIPA is scrappy. on the contrary, it has been very good. Properly documented, and does the job well. The issue is finding another alternative for it as cohesive as freeipa in the Debian ecosyystem. FreeIPA is tightly integrated into RH ecosystem that it is prone to trouble when introducing changes to the environment it runs at. Can I make it run on Debian - Sure? But, will I trust such a setup for the critical element of our stack? NO.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by suprjami on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:24AM (#36518214)

You can get up to 16 RHEL licenses for free.

You could always try talking to Red Hat Sales and dump a list of your submitted bugs at the same time. Say you need a really good deal or you're moving to Debian. The worst they can do is say no.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by lproven on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:52AM (#36518388)

[Author of the original article here]

> So, we are going to pay for RHEL for one server to run IDM.

With a free developer account you can run up to 16 copies of RHEL, with up to 8 cores each, in production, without paying.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by zshrc on Thursday June 29, 2023 @06:36AM (#36518676)

Have you tried reaching out to them about obtaining an Academic Research subscription? I believe they offer those. Can’t speak as to how much they are though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from Cent... by sheepdestroyer on Thursday June 29, 2023 @08:12AM (#36519383)

Like for the vast majority of use cases, unless you really need the bugs present in RHEL, you should be even better served by CentOS Stream than you were on old CentOS.

It's just a few patches ahead RHEL, with packaged builds using the exact same Infra and QA process.

It's not RHEL N+1 beta as some disingenuous people have argued

[ Parent | on HN ]