This is one of those situations where the solution is so obvious I kind of hate that I didn’t get it beforehand. We have open standards for everything so it makes sense to build an open standard for “Linux in Business”.
They are not creating an “open standard” because the standard is “RHEL compatible”. Do you consider RHEL an open standard?
If they were making an open standard, this would be great. That is not what they are doing. What they are doing is collaborating on the task of exactly duplicating whatever RHEL is doing.
What I just read: “Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc.” which seems like a good thing.
What I also just read: “A bunch of companies that couldn’t create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux offering.” which isn’t a good thing.
Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don’t get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don’t know enough about CIQ but I’m sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is “Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL”.
That is not a message to be celebrated.
Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?
I understand what you’re saying and I don’t think you’re missing anything. SLES, CIQ, Oracle are trying to come out as winners here but they’re cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. I can’t understand why any of these companies thought that this was a good message to send to anyone.
Can you imagine being in SLES sales? “Yeah, we attempt to clone our competitor’s product and we promise you that we can support it better than they can.”
SUSE has sort of already been making that claim for some time with SUSE Liberty Linux. Supporting a clone isn’t a big stretch. I don’t think they plan on selling it though, they had already said it would be an independent project.
SLES sales: “You really trust IBM not to bend you over? Yes, we accept Visa or Mastercard.”
On the headline “Red Hat is going to have a tough time”.
So, at the end of the day,Red Hat will have the exact same competitors they had before: Oracle, Rocky, and Liberty Linux.
Only two things have changed:
1 - All of these competitors have come out to make a big deal to reenforce that the best and most important enterprise Linux is RHEL. They have declared that the best they can do is copy Red Hat even when that becomes less convenient
2 - That the offerings from these companies may not “really” be identical to RHEL anymore because Red Hat no longer supplies them directly
So, the same competitors but not as good as before as measured against their self-declared gold standard ( RHEL ).
Why is Red Hat going to have a tough time?
Because Redhat has IBM hands shoved up through it’s ass upto it’s brains so it’s days are numbered.
Don’t underestimate IBM honchos to fuck up a good thing. Recently heard Redhat dropping dev support for a bunch of packages in fedora or something.
The moment someone fucks up… open source always brings alternatives. See: open office vs. Libreoffice… the bunch of firefox derivatives.
