[ale] Maddog’s take on recent Red Hat source distribution changes

[Leam Hall]

On 8/20/23 16:20, Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale wrote:

> If I was "defending" Red Hat, it was only to point out that an "Enterprise Linux" is more than just the bits in the ISO.   It is the QA, the channel partners, the support people, the development of training and certification and many more things.  

This is why I used to support RHEL; RH made Linux fit into the enterprise manpower structure. While general Linux can do what RHEL does, RH provides a lot of brainpower to improve ease of adoption. While any sysadmin is allowed to install something that's GPL, not all sysadmins can. Nor to most companies want to spend the manpower dollars on it. In that sense, RHEL is a good thing.


> Finally, at the bottom of my blog article, was the real meat of what I had to say.   In the aftermath of Red Hat's announcement four different groups came forward and said that they were going to create a clone of RHEL.   If these four groups were going to spend the time and money to each create a clone, that means we would have four more "RHEL"s.   I pointed out that this was, at best, three clones too many.   I also pointed out that what we really needed was a competitor to RHEL, a better RHEL, not just a clone.
> 
> But that is hard work, and from my experience would take much more money than the 10 million dollars that SUSE was putting forth, even if they only managed to copy the RHEL release source code (all of it, GPL or not) and rebuild it.   It is the rest of what is needed that would cost a lot more to bring to the table.   It probably could be done.  I would encourage it to be done.

Totally agree on this. There are lots of distros out there, and while I encourage creativity and deep learning, building and maintaining a distro is a lot of hard work. Most of the ones I've seen seem to have a lack of developers to cover the issues. Unfortunately, so many of us are nerds without great social skills. Team building is tough work.

Leam

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