In case you missed the news, CIQ, SUSE and Oracle basically formed a pitchfork mob against RedHat yesterday
This looks like exactly what Red Hat wanted. Other distributions to use CentOS Stream and contribute to the open source community instead of just copying their work. Hardly a "pitchfork mob."
I agree. Still fun nonetheless, seeing some of the biggest players banding together against a competitor.
It's still an issue though for mainly science areas with large HPC clusters who need stable supported OS releases for extremely expensive specialty software. Looking at the pricing, Redhat now wants to take quite a large chunk in licensing fees out of science budgets.
Not really because Red Hat doesn't do HPC stuff unless I'm mistaken. Alma leaned into that by basing on CentOS Stream, being ABI compatible with RHEL, and creating an HPC SIG. The exact things Red Hat was encouraging people to do. The whole point was to get these companies to get involved in the community instead of copy pasting. Despite all the bitching and moaning, it seems to be working.
Nah, prices have gone up considerably. Generally around 250~350€ per year per Server depending on your deal for Redhat. SUSE is about the same, both are currently recalculating, most likely upping the price. HPC-nodes cost less (somewhere around 30-80€/year). But they make it all way too complicated by binding license costs to CPU count for example and now after abandoning that to other nonsense. Lead to a brief popularity of dual-core servers a few years ago, since Oracle licenses were all CPU-core count based. Don't know how that is currently going.
Also it depends on other stuff like support levels and whatnot. We once had to get an expert on licensing costs to get an offer for licensing a few servers and even these people could not respond immediately and had to go through several documents to calculate the price - note those weren't resellers, those were from the Company themselves. I had to stiffle a few laughes during that conference...
I always hear opensuse is a really great distro with features and lot of gui accessible settings (starting services, and apps,etc) not available anywhere else, really good stability and the latest packages unlike any Debian based distro, but in the same time they say it's not newbie friendly so am kinda not sure if i want to use it.
I would say there's a lot that makes it a good choice for new users. Yast itself gives you a lot of admin tasks in a gui. You have btrfs with snapshots out the box. The installer allows you to install multiple de's and enable propriety software. Obs let's you find everything you need software wise. The biggest issue is knowing it's all there.
Basically RedHat changed their source code policy and have ostracized the open source community.
Not entirely, they have restricted access to the source code for paying customers, which is absolutely allowed by the license(s). Whether that’s understandable because they need money too, or unethical because it violates the principles of OSS is up to yourself to decide.
yepp - our compute cluster runs rocky8, and will have to transition (again..) to something else, probably suse.
Been there, it's not fun. Transitioned the new HPC cluster from redhat to suse. Switched to Centos after a few years on suse due to pricing and their software becoming more and more unstable. The following cluster got CentOS from the start and then got migrated to rocky after they switched Centos to rolling release. It's not easy running this stuff...
we've transitioned before from CentOS 7 to Rocky 8 and it was not too bad, mostly just a good amount of planning and testing. we've got about 160,000 cores between 2 clusters (1277 nodes that i help manage, and 825 that are located at a facility that handles hardware for us) -- fortunately I do primarily hardware work so don't deal with the software headaches myself, and the people that do are very capable - but typically you'll have incompatibilities, and a lot of user support stuff for the first couple weeks until things smooth out.
It's mostly sad but I had to laugh really damn hard when Oracle wrote about "keeping open source open", fucking Oracle!!!
