@vwbusguy https://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/el-errata

@vwbusguy Also, look at this. Errata:

https://linux.oracle.com/errata

@vwbusguy Not sure if Oracle and Red Hat/IBM have a secret deal, but using the Oracle source is a good workaround.

I don't believe IBM directly directed Red Hat to do this with RHEL. There's no evidence of that. However, when IBM bought Red Hat, there was some hope that IBM would culturally become more like Red Hat, but instead the opposite appears to be happening. Red Hat appears to rather be culturally embracing the slowly dying star of IBM, mostly of its own volition.

@cinja I guess, maybe? Stepping that up: why are companies smaller than enterprises using RHEL?

Not saying that RHEL is bad. It’s that I never saw which ways it was better than Debian for those not buying RH support contracts.

(For that matter, I’ve been peeling the Ubuntu layers off my own servers to reveal the bare Debian goodness.)

@tek a: I've been switching to debian for servers for a couple years now. Doing so in production is a slow process.

b: We never ran RHEL at $dayjob but we ran a ton of CentOS and had developer access to RHEL docs.

We ran CentOS at first because of price and was fully binary compatible with RHEL. At the time redhat was just redhat, it was rock solid, and had better vendor app and hardware driver support.

Once IBM bought redhat, a lot of those original choice reasons started becoming invalid, we changed our intended standardization to debian, and have been slowly migrating things since.

@geerlingguy I remember those Red Hat commercials and how "cool" Red Hat Summit felt. They had people like Corey Doctorow as a keynote speaker!

You can be mad about #RedHat but the truth is we do NOT have a sustainable model for #FOSS under #Capitalism

... and they're going to continue to abuse our efforts and eat our lunch until we do.

#Linux #FSF

@aspensmonster Alright, that makes sense.

(And yeah, that makes it extra bad for RH. By analogy, IBM thinks everyone should be on an i-Series (or whatever they’re calling it this decade), but it’s impossible to play with one unless you get a job playing with one. And voila, now zero people are learning it.)

Re: the unfolding Red Hat own goal drama.

I never quite figured out why people used RHEL over Debian for non-corporate work in the first place.

Things with #Calckey have certainly quieted down 🤔
I’m still seeing new migrations to Calckey, but not hearing as much buzz lately. Perhaps leveling off?
Does anyone know when the big name change happens?

Nothing like booting a live #AlmaLinux DVD image to a server to fixed the botched #RHEL install.

Another #legal question.

Let's say I take a piece of (GPL) software and redistribute it but restrict its further redistribution with a secondary license.

Since I have broken the terms of the original license does that mean the people to whom I have distributed it do not have properly licensed software (since my distribution rights are granted by the license I have broken)?

Could #RHEL's _users_ actually be sued for using unlicensed software?

#Linux #RedHat #CentOS #RockyLinux #AlmaLinux

@geerlingguy did a great job here in expressing what's going on with #RedHat and #Linux right now from an #opensource contributor perspective.

https://youtu.be/kF5pyVUQBH8

@vwbusguy Looks like you can just download and install it. No Oracle account required.

https://www.oracle.com/linux/

And so ... much ... source

https://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL9/baseos/latest/x86_64/index_src.html

Maybe we'll have Oracle Linux clones going forward

@Valon_Blue Speaking of which, it's an odd quirk to this that Oracle Linux appears to be unaffected and continues to publish their sources publicly, so Oracle Linux might end up being the de facto way to get timely RHEL sources for now.

@Valon_Blue Oracle Linux isn't fully RHEL, though. For example, they don't strip out btrfs support from the kernel like RHEL does. I for one would not be upset if AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux included that. There's a way to do it after the fact with those distros via CentOS Hyperscale repos, but not (in any supported way) for actual RHEL.

I'm not saying #RedHat isn't destroying what reputation it had among #Linux geeks, but restricting #RHEL source to thwart clones is very likely a good short-term (and potentially long-term) decision in terms of revenue.

There's nothing preventing them from changing this policy in the future if it doesn't work out for them.

@Valon_Blue This is a well written article that handles many of the nuances well. One thing to note is that *most* of the RHEL source is still available via CentOS Stream, but very importantly, many security patches hit RHEL first and then Stream later. AlmaLinux in particular was getting those patches out within a day or less of them hitting RHEL and often well before Stream. This makes that task more difficult. AlmaLinux and Rocky might need to pull those from Oracle.