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