An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.

  • poVoq
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    21 year ago

    This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.

    I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.

    • Baron Von J
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      31 year ago

      doesn’t Fedora drift fairly well ahead of RHEL with new major releases of components from upstream with every release? Especially with the kernels getting so far out of sync with between the two.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        As far as kernels go, I wonder if it is at all practical to do what Arch does and provide a linux-lts package. Maybe they do and I am simply not aware of it. I haven’t used Fedora in a while.

      • poVoq
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        -21 year ago

        Yeah, but that is Red Hat’s problem then, no?

        • Baron Von J
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          21 year ago

          Well I wouldn’t go around asserting software that I develop works on RHEL on account of me testing on Fedora because even with 13 month of package updates for Fedora, a supported RHEL release could be running a kernel 4 years older than any currently supported Fedora version. If I have customers who demand RHEL compatibility, I have to either lose that business or test on RHEL

    • tool
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      1 year ago

      Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:

      Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)

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      v

      CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)

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      v

      RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)

      And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.

      And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.

      • poVoq
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        11 year ago

        You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.

        It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.

    • jerry
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      11 year ago

      I use redhat at home for proprietary video, once I pulled out flatpak it’s become my favorite distro. I hate the changes redhat made, but from a business standpoint I totally get it.