At the end of June, Red Hat, world leader in opensource (acquired by IBM for the largest sum in software history), decided to reserve access to the sources of production versions of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system for its customers. Only the pre-release (or "rolling release") sources, known as CentOS Stream, remain freely accessible.
Why is this so important? Because totally free distributions were created from these sources, historically CentOS and more recently Rockylinux and Almalinux. Today, many more servers worldwide run on these "free" versions than on RHEL.
Oracle Linux, another RHEL-compatible distribution, is also concerned, but with a heavyweight in the sector behind it: Oracle ($42.4 billion in 2022 sales vs. $60.5 billion for IBM). Oracle's response, as expected, was slower in coming, as an Oracle / RedHat partnership had just been formed in January, enabling RHEL to be used in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Oracle's response here, "Keep Linux Open and Free-We Can't Afford Not To", is a full-scale attack by IBM on their strategic turnaround. Oracle is careful not to attack RedHat, but focuses on its parent company IBM. Oracle guarantees to always supply the source code for Oracle Linux, but from version 9.2 onwards, compatibility with RHEL can no longer be fully guaranteed.
Finally, the German company SUSE, which also supplies a Linux-based operating system, has announced that it will fork RHEL.
What does this have to do with our GoFAST CIO customers?
The operating system used by GoFAST has been CentOS for over 10 years. With support due to end in July 2024, we carried out a number of studies to choose the new target OS, including paid solutions such as RHEL (the subscription increase would remain low) and free solutions such as Oracle Linux, Almalinux and others. Our 1st analysis led us to choose Almalinux.
Certain criteria were key, such as the rapid availability of security patches, security profiles (ANSSI BP-28, CIS, ...) for OpenSCAP (security compliance audit tool), compatibility with our Tenable security scan tool, and many other considerations.
A very costly analysis for an IT department, but included in the GoFAST subscription which guarantees that no strategic GoFAST component has passed end-of-life (unless there is extended support provided by a third-party company).
Since our summer 2022 analysis, the IBM/RedHat decision has changed the game once again.
Almalinux and Oracle have decided to leave the 1:1 compatibility (to the bug) with RHEL.
As for RockyLinux, they seem intent on overriding RedHat's ban on the use of source code distributed to their customers, as RockyLinux considers this to be incompatible with the GPL v2 opensource license. And yet this seems quite legal (and surely verified by an army of lawyers for IBM).
Almalinux's (and Oracle Linux's) choice to leave 1:1 compatibility is not in itself a problem. Indeed, GoFAST is an application delivered as an "Appliance" (including all software layers including the operating system) and is not designed to be imperatively compatible with Redhat.
In theory, this could even result in a more reliable or more secure operating system. Indeed, if Almalinux or Oracle Linux included a security patch more quickly, this would be the case. Another example, as Oracle has already done, is to add functionalities not available or abandoned by RedHat, such as the Btrfs file system in Oracle Linux.
In addition, our new "Containerized" architecture is less dependent on operating systems, as the number of binaries or packages required is lower. Dedicated "Container OS" exist, such as Fedora and Redhat CoreOS and UBI, PhotonOS (VMWare), Google Container-Optimized OS, Flatcar Container Linux.
In the history of GoFAST, this is the 2nd time we've had to change a significant technology brick (the last was the replacement of JSXC chat technology by Element), all without any hassle or cost to our customer CIOs.
But this is just one major example, our customer CIOs don't need to worry about the day-to-day :
- security monitoring and patches,
- updates, even major ones (for Alfresco, for example)
- even on-premise supervision of their dedicated instance.
The result is significant time and cost savings, not to mention the rare, specialized skills no longer needed in-house to perform all these tasks.
For GoFAST's CIO customers, this is a very important added value in addition to the intrinsic qualities of the platform itself, one of the few Opensource alternatives to Sharepoint/Teams.
Christopher Potter, President & Founder, CEO-Vision S.A.S software vendor of GoFAST DigitalWorkplace & DMS/ECM
Ref.:
- https://rockylinux.org/fr/news/keeping-open-source-open/
- https://almalinux.org/fr/blog/our-value-is-our-values/
- https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/
- https://almalinux.org/fr/blog/future-of-almalinux/
- https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/
- https://www.suse.com/news/SUSE-Preserves-Choice-in-Enterprise-Linux/?ref=news.itsfoss.com
- https://news.itsfoss.com/suse-rhel-fork/
- https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/suse_announces_rhel_fork/
- https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/