[CentOS] IBM buying RedHat

[rainer at ultra-secure.de]

Am 2018-10-30 08:06, schrieb Eddie G. O'Connor Jr.:

> 
> Yeah.....I guess that's one way to look at it.
> 
> My biggest worry? Is I've placed so much time and effort "getting to
> know" Fedora and its intricacies, idiosyncrasies, its ins and
> outs...dealt with ridicule on this very same list when I first
> started, have "cut my teeth" on learning VERY hard lessons about
> certain syntax in the Terminal and what NOT to type.......only to have
> that all "taken" away from me at the whim of IBM. It just seems
> unfair. I'm hoping like H3LL that the developers @ Fedora are
> seriously thinking about forking "Just In Case"!? I mean they could
> still use the .RPM extensions, and possibly even still pull their code
> from RHEL, but at least they would be autonomous and wouldn't have to
> rely on IBM's good will in order to keep on churning out what....to
> me...is the best Linux distro on the planet! As I write this....I'm
> eyeballing the spare ThinkPad T-410 that I've neglected since I have
> Fedora running on a Dell XPS, and I'm thinking its time to get "back
> to my roots" and to find a distro I can put on that device and run
> without concern....I've heard some decent things about this "Pop-OS"
> which comes with System76's hardware. Maybe I'll give that a
> spin......then like I had said before...there's always Debian plain
> vanilla...with maybe MATE or Cinnamon?.....or else its going to have
> to be where I buckle down and finally learn all there is to know about
> LFS and Arch Linux and then move on to one of those...(God!.....at
> 47!?....its like how can I POSSIBLY start over again!?...) and THIS is
> the kind of turmoil that ensues when a corporation buys a fully
> functioning open course company!


I think you seriously underestimate the amount of influence and sheer 
man-power RedHat brings to Linux - and IBM, too.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kernel-report-highlights-developers-roles-accelerating-pace-change/

There's a reason RHEL is an enterprise-distribution - and Debian et.al. 
aren't (and never will, outside their niches).

RedHat writes ton of code that is needed for Linux to be truly 
"Enterprise" and that exists nowhere else.
The above statistics is only the kernel - but Enterprise Linux is so 
much more than a kernel.
That code isn't going to write itself, nor is somebody else going to 
pick up unless someone will pay the bill.
Maybe somebody can fork all the code and maintain it for a while - but 
to stay relevant, there must be further development, a roadmap ...

Sure, there's Google and a couple of other companies - but they really 
only write for themselves and as much as people try cargo-culting them, 
most companies aren't Google and their use-case hardly matches anyone 
else's.

I still remember when SAP announced that their engineers had ported 
their ERP to Linux - a sparetime-project at the beginning - and they 
were making it a tier 1 platform.
That was over 20 years ago.

Linux has come a long way.