[pamhalpert]

Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything.

If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on the developer program with free subs, and removing pain in the ass subscription limitations which is why people want to use Cent/Rocky/Alma to begin with.

[kelnos]

If you build your business on top of GPL software, then this sort of repackaging/reselling is just something you have to live with. Want full control? Build your own OS and license it under the terms you want.

[asadotzler]

Apparently not.

[criddell]

> RESELLING without contributing anything

I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.

[pamhalpert]

So, what Red Hat already offers.... Was Alma and co doing upstream development where they can prove it? Was Oracle patching upstream first or only in oracle linux? Was Rocky offering anything unique, value adding, or were they just copy pasting and selling?

It may sound loaded, but I'm genuinely asking, because from what I've seen the answer in regards to value add is pretty ambiguous.

[5e92cb50239222b]

https://lwn.net/Articles/929582

AFAIK Oracle employs major contributors to btrfs and XFS. I'm mostly interested in filesystems, so I can't speak for other subsystems (seems like they do a decent amount of work on core kernel development — the really important stuff like schedulers and the memory subsystem — second place just below Google).

[Conan_Kudo]

Oracle Linux is also not a pure RHEL clone. They customize it as they desire and ship it accordingly. For example, they have an alternative kernel for their distribution with different features.

[attentive]

But they also have RHEL native kernel version for version if you're to choose to run that instead. It's just that RHEL kernel is usually very old and UEK kernel has more modern features and improvements in it.

Overall while they have some extra packages available they are on top of RHEL clone and you don't have to use them.

[CAP_NET_ADMIN]

You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?

[pamhalpert]

Who cares? Every country has skillful, qualified information technology individuals. Additionally, a quick google search shows it looks like RH does offer US only support if a customer is willing to pay.

https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/security-strict-data-han...

[Geezus_42]

Is there anything to stop RedHat from pulling patches from Rocky? Is Rocky's code not available? Rocky isn't doing anything that CentOS (and RedHat project) isn't as far as I know.

[pamhalpert]

The problem isn't Red Hat getting them, the problem is a Rocky "customer" would have to just wait for Red Hat to release the patch and then wait for rocky to re-build, and re release.