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Comment by Espionage724 | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros?

I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. And if I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server.

Why would I want to use forks of RHEL instead of the 3 real and supported RH distros?

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> a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros

Small point of info:

Only one (1) of these companies has its own distro family: SUSE.

OUL is a CentOS clone. So is Rocky.

Why do OUL and Rocky exist if not to compete with RHEL?

Because people expect to be able to get RHEL for free?

Why does OUL exist -- there are two _real_ stories.

[1]

Oracle wanted Jboss. RH bought JBoss, allegedly to spite Oracle. Oracle retaliated with a RHEL clone.

Side note: I used to work on some JBoss documentation. Probably a few lines I wrote are still in there. The strong feeling I got inside RH was "we hate Java and want to kill it." Weird when you're a staffer working on Java products.

[2]

Oracle was considering a hostile takeover of RH and launched a RHEL clone to make the share price drop.

It didn't work.

Note, these 2 theories are not mutually exclusive.

RHEL is only free for a limited number of personal or developer licenses.

What's the problem with that?

I don't know the exact limitations, but for a personal home lab that seems fine. For companies, I imagine they could either pay proper for RHEL, use free CentOS Stream or Fedora, or some other server distro like Ubuntu or SUSE. Why is there such a need for RHEL specifically?

>Why is there such a need for RHEL specifically?

Just a guess, but I'd posit that revenues from RHEL support contracts pay the salaries of CentOS Stream and Fedora developers and maintainers.

I could be completely wrong, but given that the latter two feed the former, it would make sense.

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