The Path Forward for Rocky Linux | Hacker News Reader

The Path Forward for Rocky Linux

rockylinux.org

35 pointsgeerlingguy11 comments

Does it mean that Rocky will have legal access to source packages of RHEL (as soon as they go out for RHEL) to still be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL?

Quoting [1]: [Reno, NV, June 22, 2023] – Rocky Linux, a prominent community-driven open-source distribution of Enterprise Linux (EL), remains confident in its ability to continue as a bug-for-bug compatible and freely available alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), despite changes in accessibility."

[1] https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/

This doesn't clarify anything

Not sure if you meant to quote them here sarcastically.. it’s like if I make an announcement to say I’m confident Elon Musk will give me a billion dollars for nothing. Will it happen? Probably not, does it have any value declaring to the world - about as much as the guy who made the Rockylunux announcement.

I would like to see how they will bypass RHEL agreements and not be a CentOS Stream downstream.

1. Secretly take sources from a RH customer in a country with "friendly" laws;

2. Diff sources as necessary;

3. Publish diffs.

That would work fine, at least until RH starts fingerprinting patches per customer, which would be expensive and risky.

Not every packages in RHEL is GPL. Red Hat could just refuse to offer source code for those licensed in permissive licenses.

> We further developed a process for continuing to supply updates as they are released. Fortunately we already had the Peridot build system in place to manage the additional imports and automate them.

From where? CentOS stream or directly from RHEL?

This and the last press release use this weird wishy-washy language for some reason, while Almalinux has been straight to the point.

I wonder if they'll try to recreate something functionally similar to the RHEL SRPMs, but starting from CentOS Stream git.

Maybe this won't be good for the users, but I'd like to see this go to court somehow... It'd be a pretty interesting case to follow.

does anyone have any details about how they do it? I briefly crawled the repos, etc but couldn't find any clue. Where is this disussion happening? IRC only?

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