Main points:
“The AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible” by contributing to Centos Stream.
AlmaLinux “will also start asking anyone who reports bugs in AlmaLinux OS to attempt to test and replicate the problem in CentOS Stream as well, so we can focus our energy on correcting it in the right place.”
This is exactly what Red Hat wants. They want the ‘rebuilders’ to contribute to CentOS Stream, and as far as I can tell, welcome the efforts of all contributors to Centos Stream.
I can’t fault that logic. I’m transitioning off of RHEL related dust rod as soon as I get a slow week at work.
I wonder how many users of AlmaLinux depended on that bug-to-bug compatibility. E.g., if you use Alma as testing environment before deploying production RHEL, then the fact that you have a patched Alma is very bad for you. Of course this will be less of an issue for folks who just want a stable server distro.
I also wonder if anybody knows what Rocky devs are doing?
The gist seems to be they want to abuse the UBI images or low cost cloud instances to rip out the RPM sources. Those statements would make me really nervous if I had a business using Rocky. Strange for an enterprise Linux focused server distribution. I think Alma’s approach shows a lot more maturity and foresight as a project.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-RHEL-Source-Access
CIQ/Rocky wins a lot of EL Contract, yet they don’t even want to work as CentOS Stream SIG… :/
That is really good news, so they finally change from a parasitic relationship to a contributing one! This is a win for open source, even though many people like to paint red hat as the bad guy here.
Cudos to Alma for this decision.
I hope CIQ and Rocky can reflect on this. CIQ already win a lot of EL Contract, but nagging Red Hat to fix everything… :/ don’t even put any money, and hoarding all of money, asking Red Hat work for free…
As someone who built a server with Alma before this who mess started, I am happy with my distro choice
As an Almalinux user I wanted them to tell Red Hat to fuck off with their Stream, but this news is still good I guess for the short/mid term. I still think they are making a mistake for trusting Red Hat to keep their products/ sources up.