this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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TLDR: SUSE plans on investing $10+ million over the next several years on developing a free binary compatible RHEL fork.

They expect and encourage community input during the development.

SUSE will also continue maintaining SUSE Linux Enterprise, naturally.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

SuSe record with OpenSuSe is pretty good. I love their open build service. Nice to see them filling in the void IBM created by doing ibmy thingy to RHEL.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

SUSE being mega based, Oracle being based for once. Alma & Rocky are also always based. This is great in terms of the open source community rn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's stuff like this that makes me want to give Tumbleweed a try.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

...but why trust SuSE? I want to leave RedHat as well, but wouldn't be going to SuSE just set up conditions for the same thing to happen again? Is SuSE more trustworthy than RedHat, and if so, why?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.

Sounds like they're spinning this off to a separate legal entity which won't be profit driven. I'm not saying don't be cautious, but it looks like they're taking appropriate steps to work with the community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think I'm going to try Aeon as my daily driver, even though zypper is laborious as hell. Let's see how long I last.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Idk, one is investing in keep an decent open source RHEL compatible and the other is the opposite maybe they are not literally the same. You are traveling in a dangerous zone of the "if". You can conjecture anything in the "if" zone

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oracle, IBM, Microsoft. It's called market precedent. What's to prevent a major corporation owned by a venture capital company to turn around and do the same thing years down the line? What to prevent them from making this "open source community" beholden to members of the board from said corporation, similar to Fedora?

"Idk man". Conjecture can be tempered by experience. Remember that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sorry about that but Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other gigantic corpo are already the biggest contributors to the kernel, key projects like wayland and gcc are maintained almost entirely by red hat (now IBM) so we are already in this situation. Although thanks to amazing maintainers we still have these beautiful community distros: Mint, Arch, and Debian Linux, if you don´t need any fancy support these ones already give you all you need.
Don't get me wrong I hate what Red Hat did, but Suse is offering an alternative for everyone that was using RHEL without official support and so what? If you need a big company support, accept with happiness what Suse had to offer. If you don´t Debian, was and will be always there for your servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not a problem :) just answer directly next time. In any case:

It's not that they became the biggest contributors out of nowhere you know. It's not like they did it out the love in their heart and because of ideal, morals and ethics. It was seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to be left behind. Remember both Microsoft and Oracle tried to sue various Linux distributions and the kernel maintainers themselves because they claimed that they or one of their subsidiaries had intellectual property that Linux was using - which was patantly false (pun intended).

In modern times they push to prevent moving away from GPL2 to something like GPL3 because they've already gamed the license - especially Oracle, which allows them to contribute back as little as possible, and they couldn't have done that if they weren't benefactors and members of the Linux Foundation.

Some would even say Microsoft's "embrace, expand & extinguish" tactic is still well and alive to this very day. And we're talking about the company that has a history of hidden licensing fees.

In any case, I guess SuSE is more trustworthy than all of them - again because of historical presedence. But I'm still sceptical!

In regards to Microsoft, IBM and Oracle? I'm cynnical. But it's deserved cynicism, because of the afformentioned historical presedence.

I'm not saying that people, organizations, companies, corporations, governments, multinationals, etc can't reform... buuuut... yeah. All of these companies have a horrible history of patent wars and subverting consumers, as well as open source projects. Soooo... yeeeeeaaaah...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, you never answered my question. You merely dismissed it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Because for me it misses the point entirely, but answering your question directly: if you need some kind of "enterprise level" support you just have to "trust" some company, you have no choice, for full paying customers red hat is still ok and SUSE will fulfill the remaining needs. But if you don´t need extensive third-party support and don´t wanna be held hostage by the goodwill of some bullshit corpo you should be using Debian for a long time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

SuSE may, in the future, pull some stunt similar to IBM/RedHat; but, IBM/RedHat have already pulled those stunt(s).

So, yeah. SuSE are probably more trustworthy right now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It would be so cool if they created the Debian for RPM/Enterprise Linux and all the other distros from that "family" used it as a rock-solid upstream base.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We already have it. It's called Debian.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, and I love it. However, after knowing the deb and the rpm worlds for the 20 years I've been using Linux, I believe it is too late for these two sides to unite and work together.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Even without talking about different dot extension, there are multiple incompatible repo with the same ones. Take RHEL vs SuSE vs Fedora, or Ubuntu vs Debian

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

In reality, if you're a mid or large sized business, it won't make any difference. My company continues to pay for RHEL for the piece of mind of knowing we get support (even though we never use it!)

I can totally see enthusiasts and small businesses going with cheaper options (aka free!)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know if the 10M is a pun or something but it reminisce the same amount that Mark Shuttleworth pledged when he started a Debian fork project called Ubuntu.

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