Well. Now it sounds quite serious.

Either that, or it could be the beginning of a very long and pointless lawsuit.

For what?

RHEL is designed to make forks difficult to do without infringing on trademarks.

Actually, quite the opposite. Going all the way upstream to Fedora, the trademarks are designed to be easy to change out. Going from Fedora to CentOS Stream shows one brand swap over. And if you have RHEL, you can easily compare the package sets between CentOS Stream and RHEL to see which packages are swapped for branding.

Both Red Hat and SUSE distributions make it easy because internally both companies need to do the trademark swap in their own engineering pipelines.

The Rocky Linux folks pointing out some of the things that make it hard: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/

Rocky Linux is trying to specifically recreate RHEL exactly. That adds a new set of challenges that most people shouldn't care about.

If you want to create a derivative of any Fedora/CentOS distribution, that's not hard. But if you're trying to recreate, that's a different story. You have to care about things like build sequencing, NVRs, etc.

For example, if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a RHEL-compatible distribution by deriving from CentOS Stream, I only need to swap the branding packages and call it a day. The rest of my engineering effort can be spent in Fedora or CentOS Stream as appropriate. But if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a distribution that re-creates RHEL, then I need all the source packages to build, figure out build orders, and swap out branding. I also have to do my own lifecycling and validation. I am also now responsible for the maintenance of all the software and ensuring people get updates.

One is easy. The other isn't.

And in fact you probably won't create a perfect reproduction given you don't have access to the very complex RHEL build system. (CentOS didn't either.) Which makes some of the angst over just using CentOS Stream because it's not a downstream rebuild a bit misplaced.

I would guess Suse is trying to do the harder one. I could be wrong, but I think the intended audience is people that want to drop RedHat and the associated cost, but with minimal changes to everything in their ecosystem other than the OS itself.

If Suse thinks they are going to make money in this space via support contracts rather than licensing, it's sort of a "commoditize your complements" thing...commoditizing the paid license subscription part. That's a guess though. It's not clear to me how they plan to make money with this move.

I expect they have three objectives:

- damage and embarrass Red Hat, their direct competitor - enhance their own brand, brand awareness, and reputation with customers of their competitor. Sell more of their own existing enterprise offerings as a result. - create an alternative distribution that they can monetize if it turns out to be more popular than their own offerings ( even if only in one geography )

The community has a large amount of experience with debranding RHEL. CentOS did it for decades.

If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.

I believe the idea is that RedHat will likely be more thorough with a commercial entity than they were with CentOS. Yes, I'm sure it's technically possible, but also possible they will get into some back-and-forth with RedHat.

I wouldn’t be so certain. Oracle has been doing this for years with Oracle Linux.

Redhat debranded RHEL for CentOS. It was one of the things CentOS compalined about, so RedHat made it easier for them. Maybe it saved RedHat money overall by avoiding trademark protection (IANAL).

Better let Oracle know!

An interesting thing about Oracle Linux...

  $ ssh [email protected] cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
  Oracle Linux Server release 7.9
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.9 (Maipo)

  $ ssh [email protected] cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
  Oracle Linux Server release 8.8
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.8 (Ootpa)

  $ ssh [email protected] cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release 
  Oracle Linux Server release 9.2
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.2 (Plow)

I guess Oracle doesn't remove all the branding. I don't remember how CentOS handled this.

redhat-release is a symlink to /etc/centos-release:

  $ cat /etc/redhat-release 
  CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)

My understanding is /etc/redhat-release needs to be there because some (dumb) blob drivers specifically check that file to see if you're running a compatible RHEL system before it'll even attempt to install.

At a previous job, we had a wrapper script that swapped the file out before attempting to launch Dell software installers/firmware updaters, because they sometimes checked for hardcoded exact strings like that in there, and errored out, and whether or not it did that varied back and forth over the years.

I guess the guy with 18 years of experience there might be well suited for the job then!

Doesn't matter. IBM/Red Hat has deep pockets, they can drag competitors into meritless lawsuits for as long as they want just for the sake of deterrence. Having hired a former VP who probably knows a trade secret or two sounds like a good enough excuse to cry wolf.

> IBM/Red Hat has deep pockets, they can drag competitors into meritless lawsuits for as long as they want just for the sake of deterrence

If IBM sues SUSE, Oracle might try to intervene, on the grounds that a ruling against SUSE could negatively impact them as well.

I'm not sure if IBM vs Oracle is a lawsuit either would want to have. Both have very deep pockets, and substantial corporate experience with litigation. So, that factor may help protect SUSE

I really hope that you are right. Never thought there would come a day when I must root for Oracle to help defend open source, but here we are.

Oracle will never second Open Source, I assure you. They will defend themselves. Occasionally that may benefit you accidentally. If so, I would not bet on it continuing.

What lawsuits? Over what?

or he is just trying to get some moment to sell his second Linux company, get some $$$, and stay there in Switzerland..

They're admitting that the Linux that enterprise people want is RHEL (or RHEL-based) and not SLES.

The US market is primarily RHEL. Historically the EU market and SAP shops were SLES. I admit I’m far enough removed today that I’m not sure if that still holds true.

Enterprises don't care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider.

RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.

From what I've seen big enterprises have thousands of RHEL or SLES licenses and the whole thing is managed by one guy who can hardly migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 because of the huge backlog of work he has.

For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years

Had to laugh at that, as I still have a good deal of RHEL/CentOS 7 and I'm the "one guy" managing these systems.

I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.

I've done a few of those RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu moves myself, and even though it was a pain I'm still somewhat impressed over how painless the actual move was when I had good documentation and also still terrified of what it feels like to try to transition undocumented boxes.

I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.

For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.

so what you're saying is nothing business critical runs on Windows?

No. Just that Windows servers are much easier to navigate to find what files and systems are running.

With Linux systems, sure, you can check chron and top and find what is running and where it is but it's a bit more unwieldy than the windows GUI, plus you don't always have a full list of the file and folder permissions and getting a full list of those requirements for whichever softwares are accessing them.

Oh, I see, that makes sense.

You struck a nerve on this one ;)

No biggie, they could always outsource it to IBM and they'll do it in 4 years.

My feeling is that most engineers outside of Germany prefer RHEL to SLES.

So as a daily desktop user, how different are they in a professional environment?

Depends on what you mean. Advanced GUI is much better on SUSE though https://yast.opensuse.org/

My feeling is most engineers prefer Debian. It's managers that tend to prefer corporate solutions.

As an engineer I don't care. In my career I have worked on SunOS, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Alpine and probably more.

I prefer something that is kept reasonably up to date so that I don't have to fight ancient long-fixed issues or missing features. But I really don't care, if it pays the bills I'll use it.

Going back about 15 years with this, but I used to prefer Debian / Ubuntu as a user, but for automating pxe installations and setting up package repos, Redhat/Centos were miles better.

I remember that way back when, Deutschebank standardised on SuSE because they were a major shareholder in the company. DB had an IT department bigger than most entire companies, so I'm sure that had a pretty big effect on the ecosystem.

Interesting - Deutsche Bank is one of the flagship OpenShift customers.

That tracks with my experience. I played with OpenSuSE but only ever found SLES when dealing with SAP.

RHEL, either officially paid for, or via CentOS / Oracle Linux, is everywhere though, gub'mnt, private, academia.

I think they are positioning their own professionally supported enterprise distro as “the best” while positioning this Red Hat clone as the free-est ( both in the free beer and freedom sense ).

It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service.

If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer.

Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work.

Really smart.

It seems this Dirk-Peter guy is a long time Red Hat guy and he probably knows Red Hat Linux inside out.

This can be 2nd most important Linux distro announcement for the good of the community by a company after Canonical's announcement of Ubuntu back in 2004, but time will tell if this going to take-off by spinning a new generic enterprise Linux distro based on RHEL.

Interestingly the last Red Hat for community (most popular at the time) is Red Hat 9 before it gone fully enterprise by launching Fedora back in 2004. Coincidentally Ubuntu was launched around the same time (now most popular Linux distro). Probably the last Red Hat Enterprise is RHEL 9 as we know it.