SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment | SUSE

somegeek, 10 months ago

common SUSE w

Mozart409, 10 months ago

What a cool move. Great job SUSE

Vilian, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

yeah, “preserving choice”

About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.

As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”

So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.

This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.

In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier

the counter point to my argument is that

It’s good history, I don’t think it really has any bearing today though.

Novell purchased SuSE Linux AG. Novell signed the agreements, and they were very controversial at the time. Novell was much more involved in the day to day than IBM is at Red Hat, SUSE was not an independent business they were a big part of Novell (the SuSE founder left at one point because of how they ran things, he did eventually return). Novell was later purchased by Attachmate, which made SUSE an independent business unit, both were acquired by Micro Focus. It was sold to EQT Partners in 2018 and operates as an independent business today.

Novell and today’s company are not the same, they’ve gone through significant changes multiple times, which is maybe a better reason to at least put in some thought.

lightsecond, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

How can SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility when source-code for future versions are no longer going to be publicly available?

jim, 10 months ago

Rocky Linux have said that they can rebuild using publicly available sources in UBI containers and cloud images.

rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/

Though reading the article, I don’t know if SUSE is simply rebuilding or forking. In any case, it’s cool to see SUSE committed to open source principles.

lightsecond, 10 months ago

Thank you. The SuSE blogpost uses the word “fork”

forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

burningquestion, 10 months ago

But they also say their fork will be RHEL-compatible, which means it’ll be a hard fork that needs to track RHEL’s changes in some way.

ozoned, 10 months ago

SUSE doesn’t HAVE to do that. That’s kind of a grey area. It’s legal, but kind of skirting things.

What you can do is get RHEL, take a look at all the packages and their changelogs, git history, find the code in CentOS, and then build your own from scratch. It’s a ton more work, Rocky wouldn’t have the resources to do it, but SUSE will.

ozoned, 10 months ago

Just realized, can’t do git history, because they wouldn’t package in the git files as that’d be internal to RHEL.

maxamillion, 10 months ago

The source code IS publicly available in CentOS Stream gitlab repos. The thing that isn’t public anymore is the pre-packaged SRPM snapshots of that code. This effectively means that if clone makers want to keep cloning RHEL, they have to pull from CentOS Stream and do some Engineering work instead of throw a script at a pile of SRPMS to rebuild them. This whole thing has been weirdly blown out of proportion in my opinion.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat so feel free the grain of salt my statements and flame me if you feel so inclined. I don’t mind people being upset about the change, I just want people to be mad at the right thing if they are going to be mad.