Hacker News Reader

Comment by yuriy-yarosh | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a AWS Bottlerocket remix with self-hosted capabilities and Azure/GCP support, and we're planning to release it for a ready to use opinionated CNCF stack Kubernetes distro (about 40 different tools), similar to VMWare Tanzu and RedHat's OpenShift.

We were facing a lot of controversy behind Flatcar already - there's no clear Licensing policy for their "Fully OpenSource" release. Kinvolk should've prepped at least a License matrix of what's been hacked out of CoreOS - what is actually behind their "Pro Features" and how exactly it is "Fully Open Source".

"Flatcar Linux Pro Features", in terms of "Linux Kernel Optimization', "GPU instances support" with "Accelerated Networking", are Not So Pro, and are something that everyone use on a daily basis.

So, just from pure Support Monetization perspective, it's impossible to use Flatcar Linux reliably for Free (mic drop).

View on HN

Thanks for dropping the mic, I'll kindly pick it up.

I'm the initiator of the Flatcar Container Linux project and former CEO of Kinvolk. Thus, I'm rather knowledgeable about the project and was involved in most decisions.

The controversy you speak of is very new to me. If you could point to any references, I'd love to be aware of them.

Firstly, there was nothing "hacked" out of CoreOS. Flatcar is literally the CoreOS Container Linux repos forked and carried on as is. Once the CoreOS EOL was reached we started updating the stale packages. That's it. Any further updates are what any distro would do in the course of maintenance to remain modern and relevant.

Secondly, anything that was previously termed the "Pro" version is now just available in the standard version. So there is no difference. To my knowledge, the project doesn't even produce any Pro versions any longer and I don't think there are even any references to it in our docs. But even when we did have a Pro version, all the work we did was done in the open and was in our source repositories. We just didn't release public builds of those.

Unlike CoreOS, we also developed* and open sourced the update server. It's called Nebraska and available here under an Apache license. https://github.com/kinvolk/nebraska

With regard to a license matrix, you can find all licenses for each release in the respective release directory. For example this one: https://stable.release.flatcar-linux.net/amd64-usr/current/f...

If you do find anything that is not 100% open source, let me know and I'll follow up to make sure that's corrected.

I'm happy your excited about your project. But I think you'll fine it's better in the open source space to compete on merit and form relationships rather than tear down other projects and the work of the people behind the projects.

* based on the Core Roller project: https://github.com/coreroller/coreroller

Thank you, blixtra.

My point is that Flatcar positioning is too cryptic and ambiguous for a lot of folks. People don't really get why they should pay for it, and that's a customer reachability issue, - a marketing problem, not an engineering one.

I'm not saying that no one should use it, or it's a bad product, it's just takes too much time and effort to get into it, to understand how the pieces of the puzzle are tied together, and why. It's really great that you've picked up EOL'ed CoreOS services and developed your own. A visual component diagram, with a couple of license icons, and a simple graphical bare metal installer would've been really nice.

> you can find all licenses for each release...

Packages SBOM doesn't give a full answer regarding architecture, existing priorities (if there's any) and project structure: what had been adopted from CoreOS and why, and what had been developed from scratch, and why ?

My primary complaint regarding "Pro" feature set, and further monetization, is that literally every growing business, with a cloud hosting provider, would target those, which makes them a necessity, not an extra option to choose from.

FlatCar should've developed something innovative to differentiate the market a bit, and monetize complex enterprise deployments, instead of sabotaging onboarding for the new folks (customer reachability), with a flat fee and "unpublished builds", of a supposedly free Open Source product. At least that's the feedback I've been able to gather on my own, so far.

> We just didn't release public builds of those.

So, if I get it right, FlatCar monetization may crumble with a "Community build" that will package all the "Pro Features" and let people use 'em for free ?

Not trying to devalue anything, but "just a viable CoreOS fork" doesn't make things magically self sustainable. It's all about the extra services that you can put on top, and real engineering problems that you may solve, for those who are willing to pay.

People expect FlatCar Linux to be Free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com