Looking at the "statement of work", unless I'm misunderstanding - it's 3 user (workstation?) licenses?<p>To me, it's more like 3 engineers at NASA are interested in it and got their boss to get them 3 licenses? As opposed to "NASA moves all RHEL licenses to Rocky after Redhat destroys CentOS community"?<p>Edit: I know nothing of how govournment agencies (and certainly not US ones) work.. I assume all purchases go through some process where they're all made public?
Wonder if the timing of this is a coincidence, considering that RedHat just announced they're stopping releasing RHEL sources except to paying customers: <a href="https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...</a><p>Link submitted by someone at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417070">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417070</a>
I wonder why they didn't follow Fermilab and CERN and choose AlmaLinux.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904336">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904336</a>
What I find interesting is all the bureaucracy needed to get 3 licenses for a "Free" RHEL Clone.<p>I wonder of Rocky got some real $ from NASA ?
What a weird way to spend federal money. I say it's weird because NASA almost certainly has its own internal Linux support paid through overhead in one form or another, and again the incremental cost of adding "developer" support from Red hat is way, way cheaper than Rocky.<p>Finally, I doubt Rocky's support can perform as well as Red Hat's. No, I'm not talking about the people who talk on the phone when you break something. If you find a bug in a package, will Rocky be able to quickly and effectively upstream the fix, or will Rocky end up maintaining you on a custom patchlevel forever?<p>I doubt Rocky has the ability to truly fulfill 24/7 support. It's difficult to build a deep bench for support, and nearly impossible to make sure you're keeping up 24/7 capability for other Maintenance Engineering type tasks.<p>And if none of these reasons are important enough to stop you from paying them, maybe the thing you're doing isn't important enough to warrant paying for support anyway.
Out of curiosity what do others see as viable Red Hat Linux alternatives?<p>If I was choosing a server OS today, I personally would probably pick Debian.
Wikipedia:<p>> <i>Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is a privately owned benefit corporation that describes itself as a "self-imposed not-for-profit".</i><p>Is this only a structure set up to fund whatever needed to be done to rebrand RHEL? Or does anyone have shares that could be worth significant money?
The more I think about the RedHat source code restrictions, the more I think this could be the reason. RedHat has mostly tolerated the free rebuilds, but now that one of them is encroaching into providing paid support (RedHat’s bread and butter), that’s a step too far and it could have poisoned the well for everyone.
Again, like large corporations, this doesn’t mean much. NASA is big and diverse, and each facility is unique and mostly independent, with lots of unrelated projects within a facility.
This headline reads backwards to me. While it would be true either way, it seems more intuitive to say "Rocky Enterprise Linux secures contract with NASA"