The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects.
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
Conversely, I wonder what this does to the Linux ecosystem. It looks like at this point, Debian and Arch are the only major self-sufficient distros (i.e. not built on top of another distro) that are still community-owned and community-driven; and of the two, Debian is clearly more broadly popular. So, will this result in Debian becoming the de facto standard of "open Linux"? This could make things interesting when it comes to packaging etc.
well, that’s basically already happened. with its strict adherence to GNU, and with the truly phenomenal number of distros based on debian (especially if you include ubuntu derived distros, but ubuntu is so different these days that idk if it’s really the same any more?)
Is it really so different though? It feels like it's been converging if anything, what with Ubuntu on systemd these days, and moving from Unity to Gnome Shell. What are the substantial differences at this point?
None of these qualify as "mainstream" compared to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu. Even SUSE, which used to be in the big league, is a shadow of its former glory.
If you look at what runs on production servers, it's virtually always RHEL/CentOS, or Debian/Ubuntu. Everybody else isn't even above 5%, and most of those you've listed are in fractional digits.
For another data point, if you look at websites, Debian+Ubuntu is already >50%. At this point, I think it's well on its way to becoming the Linux distro, with everything else being relegated to the hacker/boutique niche. And I think that this announcement, and what IBM is likely to do with RHEL afterwards, will accelerate that trend substantially.
Shame. As far as I can tell OpenSUSE & Fedora are on the same level. I often struggle deciding which one to install on new servers because I love them both so much.
Regarding openSUSE (I work for SUSE so obviously don't speak for the wider openSUSE community, just my 2¢ as a contributor):
While people do have a reasonable level of hostility over the Novell acquisition (which has left some deep cultural scar tissue within SUSE), they did give us openSUSE.
Overall there is often worry when we have an acquisition (since a very large portion of openSUSE maintainers are employed by SUSE). With EQT quite a few folks were worried about how separated the finances were between openSUSE and SUSE and I believe Richard Brown commented on how exactly he's pushing for better financial and trademark separation (the only two things that they really share anymore).
So while people do get worried every one in a while, I get the impression that overall things are going okay despite the series of acquisitions in recent years.
However, Fedora/RedHat have a different structure and relationship and I wouldn't use the openSUSE/SUSE model to predict how things will work out.
I wonder if the Fedora community could immediately fork off their own and essentially "leave" IBM/RH hanging? Not even sure if that is legally possible now, as the terms of the sale could have potentially included looming/upcoming license changes that might prevent that. I'd say they'd have to act quick and with their general feeling on whether they'd want to go that route (the Fedora community), and I'm sure their would still be legal challenges from IBM in any case if they attempted something like that.
There are no legal challenges and there is no hurry. You wouldn't be able to call the fork Fedora but other than that it's absolutely impossible for any shady backroom deal to affect your future ability of forking Fedora. The licensing of the collection as well as the individual components grants you that right and there is no way to take it back retroactively.
With the current state of things, forking Fedora seems unlikely to be a wise decision. RedHat is the major contributor, paying the salaries of many Fedora developers.
So far, nothing has changed here with that acquisition.
> I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).
Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know.
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
This is 100% true. They abandoned so many good parts of WU and, today, it seems to continue to operate as data collection (mobile apps / home weather stations) and ad revenue generation.
>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
OpenSolaris came after regular Solaris. It was a retroactive opening of code, and wasn't as essential to regular Solaris. In contrast, Fedora is quite instrumental to RHEL's existence. CentOS is not that instrumental, but it's not a major cost sink either. It used to be community driven earlier and can become so again. i.e., Unless they go out of their way to do something malicious, which would have little payoff anyway.
CentOS is the main competition to RHEL licenses. I have been in many meetings where the "use CentOS so if we have to buy RHEL its an easy conversion " was made
I assumed Redhat was going to capture lost revenue by somehow making CentOS less viable.
IBMs business nature makes me think its even more likely now.
From my perspective, it always seemed that RHEL's big problem was that CentOS was easier to use. Whenever I set up a machine, I always reached for CentOS because to me it was the same thing, except I didn't have to ask for a license, I didn't have to securely store the license, I didn't have to enter the license, and I didn't have to document my strategies for handling those things.
It's generally also more reliable. In any sort of an org like setup, RHEL will be managed through Satellite. The new Satellite seems like a massive pain. The old one also had issues. Running centos compared to registering clients to satellite is a breadth of fresh air. Sometimes I wonder if RH creates complexity, and sells these overly complicated solutions to problems they create.
I can't find the reference, but Red Hat recently hugged CentOS after sort of passively ignoring it for a while. Now, as I understand it, Red Hat has committed to actively supporting CentOS.
They're different products for different customers. Folks who want to work cheap and hack their own stuff together will use CentOS and would never have bought a RHEL license anyway.
Meanwhile, folks who need a "we've got support" answer for every question will use RHEL and wouldn't be tempted by CentOS anyway; the cost savings is not worth the risk.
That's the thing with an acquisition like this: what did IBM buy exactly? The code is open source, the people can leave and form a new company. The thing IBM really owns are Red Hat's contracts. But when those expire, the other party could sign their new contract with a company of former Red Hatters, if they want.
Buying an open source company only makes sense if you give the employees of that company exactly what they want. They are the real value.
Theoretically, it seems all Red Hatters could quit simultaneously and form a new company according to the same structure they had before.
Of course in practice that requires a lot of coordination, there's a ton of legal hoops to jump through and you end up with a big company built around customers it doesn't currently have.
Gawd. Freaking. Dammit.
I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community.
Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?