If they sold for profit and started putting their changes behind a paywall, that would be terrible. But they're just benefiting from Red Hat the same way that Red Hat benefits from upstream Linux. Red Hat is the one misbehaving here.
i've been a long time lurker, non-commentator, oops. i just do most of my work on cent/rhel/rocky/oracle and i felt comfortable enough to join and comment for once
Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything.
If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on the developer program with free subs, and removing pain in the ass subscription limitations which is why people want to use Cent/Rocky/Alma to begin with.
If you build your business on top of GPL software, then this sort of repackaging/reselling is just something you have to live with. Want full control? Build your own OS and license it under the terms you want.
So, what Red Hat already offers.... Was Alma and co doing upstream development where they can prove it? Was Oracle patching upstream first or only in oracle linux? Was Rocky offering anything unique, value adding, or were they just copy pasting and selling?
It may sound loaded, but I'm genuinely asking, because from what I've seen the answer in regards to value add is pretty ambiguous.
AFAIK Oracle employs major contributors to btrfs and XFS. I'm mostly interested in filesystems, so I can't speak for other subsystems (seems like they do a decent amount of work on core kernel development — the really important stuff like schedulers and the memory subsystem — second place just below Google).
Oracle Linux is also not a pure RHEL clone. They customize it as they desire and ship it accordingly. For example, they have an alternative kernel for their distribution with different features.
But they also have RHEL native kernel version for version if you're to choose to run that instead. It's just that RHEL kernel is usually very old and UEK kernel has more modern features and improvements in it.
Overall while they have some extra packages available they are on top of RHEL clone and you don't have to use them.
Who cares? Every country has skillful, qualified information technology individuals. Additionally, a quick google search shows it looks like RH does offer US only support if a customer is willing to pay.
You are conflating geopolitics and economics that could concern someone who could end up being affected by such a trend (which the poster isn't, as they said later) with racism.
Is someone in a given country supposed to be HAPPY that a company founded in their country is intentionally putting support engineers within their founding country out of work, while simultaneously making support a worse experience for users?
Have you ever been in the situation of being on midnight call to the other side of the world while speaking with someone with whom you're having a mutually difficult time communicating? It sucks.
Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend. Fuck RH and anyone else who does this.
> Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend.
You and others in this thread are concluding that the choices provided are bad ones based solely on the locations of those choices, despite there being no good reason why these people cannot provide the same level of service that could be provided elsewhere (communication issues are curable by hiring the right people, and are not an incurable problem related to the country the speaker is in). This is precisely why I called it thinly-veiled racism. I stand by my original statement for this reason, and it was improperly flagged.
I'm not improperly judging anything. I have lived this for too long. "No good reason" is a fantasy.
There is "no good reason" other than the real world standing in the way, which is an economic motivation you keep neglecting, not a racial one.
You are either a racist, unintelligent, or else ignorant. You do not write as though you're unintelligent. I do not personally assume that people are racist because I disagree with them (though your writing makes me challenge that). I can therefore only conclude you're ignorant of what real people do at real jobs.
You're not wrong that economics motivate the choice of where to hire for a customer support function. Customer service is a cost center, so naturally companies will choose to hire where labor is cheap but the job can still be done. If it's not being done well, that's a problem to point out. But that's not what happened in this conversation.
To reiterate, here is how this thread went, in context:
>> I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.
> You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?
The bottom reply added no value to the conversation; it made no substantive claim. Since it lacked any substance, the reply merely insinuated that people from these countries cannot provide support at a level that people from other countries (such as the USA) can, and without any explanation as to why. This is the modus operandi of racists who want to choose not to be overt - leaving it to the reader to implicitly understand the unstated. Some call it a "dog whistle."
Had the speaker said "well, they're moving these functions to Colombia, Philippines and India, which are providing worse service because of <some non racist reason>," the conversation would have gone rather differently.
> You are either a racist, unintelligent, or else ignorant. You do not write as though you're unintelligent. I do not personally assume that people are racist because I disagree with them (though your writing makes me challenge that). I can therefore only conclude you're ignorant of what real people do at real jobs.
I'm not going to dignify this with a response. Take this garbage to Twitter where it belongs.
I'm actually from one of the countries they are moving jobs to, it's very US-centric to see racism whenever someone uses any geographic location that's not the "rich West".
Red Hat had some pretty sizeable layoffs recently and a bulk of their recruiting efforts are in the countries with cheaper labour.
Is there anything to stop RedHat from pulling patches from Rocky? Is Rocky's code not available? Rocky isn't doing anything that CentOS (and RedHat project) isn't as far as I know.
The problem isn't Red Hat getting them, the problem is a Rocky "customer" would have to just wait for Red Hat to release the patch and then wait for rocky to re-build, and re release.
There's nothing stopping them from using CentOS still? The latest rolling releases are so close to RHEL you'd never notice. Use an older more reliable version locked release that works to your needs and update periodically. these problems are solved for small shops quite easily.
