mostly towards oracle linux, cloudlinux and others that charge support and fees to the os.
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Perhaps, but thatâs not consistent with what they say theyâre targeting. âSimply rebuilding code without adding value or changing it in any wayâ isnât what Oracle, at least (Iâm not familiar with Amazonâs incarnation), are doingâbut it is what Rocky and Alma (and CentOS before them) are/were doing.
I think what theyâre doing is permitted by the GPLâthat license says, in short, that if they give you the binary they must also give you (on request) the source. And theyâre doing thatâif theyâve given you the binary, you have access to their portal from which you can get the source. I donât think it meets the spirit of the license, but it probably meets the letter.
Indeed it doesnâtâbut it also doesnât say anywhere that they have to give it to you in the first place.
âŠbut this is what Iâm seeing. Apparently theyâve decided to follow the Bud Light School of Marketing.
Hi Everyone
Iâm thinking by now that the title of this post is somewhat contrary to the content!
My 2 cents
Andy
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For the latest version of AmazonLinux, they are now using Fedora. Unsure if AWS has procured a license or subscription for this or not.
I read an article earlier today that RHEL has complied with GPL, although some may debate whether they complied in the practical/legal sense of the license or with the spirit of the license.
Either way, I kind of do see RHELâs point of the rebuilders using their software and that they arenât receiving enough back from them either in terms of maintenance contributions or in financial terms.
RHELâs response in pulling the repos is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but considering how the costs of producing and maintaining the software has been increasing over the past couple of years and especially over the past 20 months, I am hardly surprised.
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So do I, but it seems to overlook the fact that theyâve built their business on other peopleâs software. And Iâm aware that they do contribute back to many upstream projects, but I wonder how Linus, for example, feels about the equities hereâand I canât believe they contribute anything of significance to all the projects they use.
And really, thatâs true of any F/OSS projectâmost people are just going to use it without giving back anything of substance. If you arenât OK with that, you really shouldnât be working in the F/OSS world. And it sounds like RedHat has decided they arenât OK with this any more.
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if someone did not find my sarcasm, I am sorry, MArko
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AFAIK, the GPL doesnât allow limits on redistributing (republishing) the source codeâŠ
Which is what Red-Hat is stipulating in their Portal. according to the Alma reportâŠ
My 2 cents
Andy
Yes, I think youâre right thereâI was thinking about a different issue.
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Despite the âfactâ that e.g. Rocky Linux, Alma Linux and soon maybe others provide a âpath forwardâ, the very important aspects of "Sustainability and reliabilityâ of such âpathsâ are very uncertain and raise red flags all over the place.
So, based on lessons learned, I would argue not to await any unstable âRHELâ path forward and spend/waist resources, time and effort on that (and get disappointed again), but focus solely on sustainable and reliable wayâs for the future of NSx. Reliability, sustainability create our required Continuity so to speak.
Just saying.
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I never understood why a lot of users here advocated for âsomeâ RHEL copy as basis for NS8, when the writing was already written on the wall: Donât trust Red Hat! And some of these distros touting a âbug for bugâ copy of RHEL, as if people want bugs!
If I or a client of mine needed a platform to run say a big ticket enterprise product like SAP ERP software, I might choose to use a RHEL original or eg clone from Oracle to run the Database, as itâs fully âsupportedâ for that use case.
Ubuntu was popular for a while, until Canonical dropped itâs mask, especially with that snap-crap. The snap âclientâ software may be open source, but the server end is completly closed source, and the client is of NO use without the server side! Also, software distributed with snap often displays bad concepts, limits and plenty of other issues, which using apt / yum do not entail! Not enough space, limited possibilities to outsource the space management / usage and much more!
I was one of the few since the beginning suggesting & advocating Debian, and I still believe in Debian, one of the first Linux, older than Red Hat, and now, the last trustable, reliable Linux, suitable for server operation.
My 2 cents
Andy
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Thanks, my whole point. 3 red flags: âwantsâ, âbypassâ, restrictionsâ.
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As I said
While the community debates whether this violates the GPL, we firmly believe that such agreements violate the spirit and purpose of open source.
No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software.
Our legal advisors have reassured us that we have the right to obtain the source to any binaries we receive
RHEL can try to make things difficult. They have to redistribute the code source
I just switch to Debian and I am very happy I did it at the right time.
Michel-André
Doubtless inertia has been a big factor; Neth, and SME before it, and e-smith before that, have always been EL-based.
The âbug for bug compatibleâ is common hyperbole, the actual meaning of which is something that functions just like the original. Itâs not a matter of anyone wanting bugs, itâs a matter of wanting something that works just like RHEL.
If weâre going to continue to be EL-based, Iâm continuing to think Oracle Linux is the best of the lotâthey have plenty of resources to support it, they appear to have a good business unit behind it, and theyâve made recent public commitments to keeping it open. They could, of course, do a 180 on the latter (as RH has done), but theyâve already been using this as a major competitive advantage against RH, so it seems unwise of them to throw it away. But I quite recognize the irony of considering Oracle the âgood guys.â
NS8 in its current form works with Debian as well. Whether the recent events would be reason enough to ditch EL as a platform is another issue, though I donât think Iâd really argue against it.
Iâm not stating Red was bad per se. In fact, for several years it was really quite good.
Blue is a different animal.
Some people sell you lemon juice. Other sell you squeezed lemon pips for a surcharge.
Chronology matchesâŠ
It may have been funny in the beginning, but RHEL clone is more correct, less long.
OracleDB on OracleLinux may be considered best of breed combo, Iâm not so sure one can say that of DB2 on AIX anymoreâŠ
Both would be typical of very large enterprise environmentsâŠ
However, Larry being Larry, it would NOT surprise me if Oracle getâs to do the âHatâ trickâŠ
Office, MySQL, now the whole Linux TeamâŠ
(For the unawares, Short form: The whole âOfficeâ team quit practically in corpore at Oracle, leaving Oracle to hand Office to the Apache team. The same happened with MySQL, they forked MariaDB and said âfork you, Larry!â.)
My 2 cents
Andy
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In general, why would we care at all if NSx and beyond are vendor agnostic?
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I would generally agree with the above, given that the discussed OSes all have decent enough hardware support in the current versions for server hardware.
A reality check reveals all the âgotchasâ in small detail differences between underlying OSes, and the choice of Hypervisor if virtualized, and even the age of test hardware usedâŠ
Only in practice are there differences between theory and practice - or how did that old saying go? 
All interested in the development of NS8 from a Beta to a fine OS for networking have been following the issues that have cropped up - with the dev team doing great work to strike each one down which crops up!
I do trust in our great dev team to continue this innovative coding and make NS8 as good or better than NS7!!!
My 2 cents
Andy
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Come to think of it, SUSE is not doing bad at all too 
hereâs a recap of concerns:
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