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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

RHEL is designed to make forks difficult to do without infringing on trademarks.

Actually, quite the opposite. Going all the way upstream to Fedora, the trademarks are designed to be easy to change out. Going from Fedora to CentOS Stream shows one brand swap over. And if you have RHEL, you can easily compare the package sets between CentOS Stream and RHEL to see which packages are swapped for branding.

Both Red Hat and SUSE distributions make it easy because internally both companies need to do the trademark swap in their own engineering pipelines.

The Rocky Linux folks pointing out some of the things that make it hard: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/

Rocky Linux is trying to specifically recreate RHEL exactly. That adds a new set of challenges that most people shouldn't care about.

If you want to create a derivative of any Fedora/CentOS distribution, that's not hard. But if you're trying to recreate, that's a different story. You have to care about things like build sequencing, NVRs, etc.

For example, if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a RHEL-compatible distribution by deriving from CentOS Stream, I only need to swap the branding packages and call it a day. The rest of my engineering effort can be spent in Fedora or CentOS Stream as appropriate. But if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a distribution that re-creates RHEL, then I need all the source packages to build, figure out build orders, and swap out branding. I also have to do my own lifecycling and validation. I am also now responsible for the maintenance of all the software and ensuring people get updates.

One is easy. The other isn't.

I would guess Suse is trying to do the harder one. I could be wrong, but I think the intended audience is people that want to drop RedHat and the associated cost, but with minimal changes to everything in their ecosystem other than the OS itself.

If Suse thinks they are going to make money in this space via support contracts rather than licensing, it's sort of a "commoditize your complements" thing...commoditizing the paid license subscription part. That's a guess though. It's not clear to me how they plan to make money with this move.

I expect they have three objectives:

- damage and embarrass Red Hat, their direct competitor - enhance their own brand, brand awareness, and reputation with customers of their competitor. Sell more of their own existing enterprise offerings as a result. - create an alternative distribution that they can monetize if it turns out to be more popular than their own offerings ( even if only in one geography )

And in fact you probably won't create a perfect reproduction given you don't have access to the very complex RHEL build system. (CentOS didn't either.) Which makes some of the angst over just using CentOS Stream because it's not a downstream rebuild a bit misplaced.

The community has a large amount of experience with debranding RHEL. CentOS did it for decades.

If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.

I believe the idea is that RedHat will likely be more thorough with a commercial entity than they were with CentOS. Yes, I'm sure it's technically possible, but also possible they will get into some back-and-forth with RedHat.

I wouldn’t be so certain. Oracle has been doing this for years with Oracle Linux.

Redhat debranded RHEL for CentOS. It was one of the things CentOS compalined about, so RedHat made it easier for them. Maybe it saved RedHat money overall by avoiding trademark protection (IANAL).

I guess the guy with 18 years of experience there might be well suited for the job then!

Better let Oracle know!

An interesting thing about Oracle Linux...

  $ ssh me@myol7.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
  Oracle Linux Server release 7.9
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.9 (Maipo)

  $ ssh me@myol8.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
  Oracle Linux Server release 8.8
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.8 (Ootpa)

  $ ssh me@myol9.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release 
  Oracle Linux Server release 9.2
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.2 (Plow)

I guess Oracle doesn't remove all the branding. I don't remember how CentOS handled this.

My understanding is /etc/redhat-release needs to be there because some (dumb) blob drivers specifically check that file to see if you're running a compatible RHEL system before it'll even attempt to install.

At a previous job, we had a wrapper script that swapped the file out before attempting to launch Dell software installers/firmware updaters, because they sometimes checked for hardcoded exact strings like that in there, and errored out, and whether or not it did that varied back and forth over the years.

redhat-release is a symlink to /etc/centos-release:

  $ cat /etc/redhat-release 
  CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)

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