It looks like Amin is confusing "open source" with "free" (as in free beer).<p>He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution. And instead of paying for Red Hat, it goes to Rocky Linux, a free fork of Red Hat, just like CentOS. It is fine (at least legally), but the paid Red Hat distribution is no less open-source than Rocky Linux, in fact, the latter exists because Red Hat is open-source.<p>That's why I think this article particularly ironic, it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source and then made a move that is only possible because Red Hat is open-source. It didn't even go to something like Debian, which is the most "free/libre/open-source" of the major distros, it went to the clone of the distro they criticize.
More accurate title: <i>Rakuten did not want to pay for RHEL licenses and still does not want to pay for RHEL licenses</i><p>They were using CentOS for no cost previously and have switched to another no cost RHEL rebuild (Rocky).
The CentOS/Rocky debate was about release targets and never about the Open Source nature of it.<p>This seems simply another case of using something as the backbone of a business and demanding it to be free (as in beer).
Corporate support of a community-led RHEL compatible OS seems like an obviously good thing, and I'm surprised that so many people are worried about Red Hat's welfare? If someone doesn't feel that the costs of RHEL licensing outweigh the benefits then that's a reasonable choice for them to make, and contributing money to an existing community project that others can benefit from is way better than them doing it in-house. Open source isn't about getting everything for free, but it <i>is</i> about getting to choose to pay someone who fits your needs better rather than being tied to a specific vendor.
The interesting thing is that pretty much every single RHEL customer kept CentOS on the side as an "alternative". Over the past few years a lot of those alternatives actually became production systems (support became an app thing with Docker, not an OS thing), and now _of course_ Rocky is a better option, due to the lower cost and community backing (or just moving the hosts to Ubuntu/Debian).
> To get Rocky Linux to deliver on the same performance of Red Hat for us was a 13-month process. It was not trivial…<p>I wonder why is that, if Rocky is repackaging RHEL source performance should be identical, no?<p>Article mentions realtime kernel. It seems they were working with RH on custom kernel (that's the support contract he mentioned), but started to be asked to pay for RHEL license to use it, which understandably pisses him off
I've played the OS switcheroo game previously, it's wasteful and expensive. At this point I won't touch anything RHEL based. I have no doubts someone at IBM is working on making RHEL incompatible with other clones.<p>The answer is simple, Debian. True freedom.
Just to add some ”inside baseball” to this thread, I work for Rakuten Symphony so can give my take from my perspective, be they right or wrong. The open discussion and different points of view is what is so healthy if something wants to get stronger.<p>We are breaking apart the traditional monolith deployments in radio base stations, that are deployed at a very large distributed scale. For example we are deploying 30,000 edge nodes to do real time processing of radio baseband signalling, 23,000 of them in the the next 10 months. Now these workloads have more in common with high performance computing than they do with running standard business application systems, so we are aware we have to modify the kernel to make it cope with the real time requirements. We are removing the monolithic model because we know we can reduce the costs and increase the deployment optionality. And the existing enterprise OS licensing model was prohibitively expensive at this scale. And then our open source choices were changed.
We are happy to contribute our real time learnings back to a community since that helps us help the community to help us. What we have done is not for everybody, and others need to make their own choices for their own reasons. But we believe it is having those choices is what creates a healthy industry. And we no longer had the choices we wanted, so we want to contribute to making them for others.
It's kinda scary that there are so few mainstream Linux distros that people are willing to trust on their servers. Debian, RHEL, that's about it. And only one of those is commonly supported by major vendors like Dell, HPE and EMC.