Unpacking the RHEL Announcement: Rocky Linux Community's Response
In this video, Brian Clemens, VP of Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, discusses how Red Hat’s restriction to source code has impacted Rocky Linux’s ability to remain 1:1 compatible. Watch the full interview here: https://ter.li/quqc9p
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Transcript (lightly edited for clarity):
Sarah Balke: Hello and welcome to Open Logic by Perforce. Today, I'm joined by Brian Clemens from Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. Brian, thank you so much for joining me. For viewers who don't know who you are, could you please give us a little introduction?
Brian Clemens: Yeah. Thank you for having me. So I'm Brian Clemens. I'm the Vice President of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and I'm the program manager for the Rocky Linux Project.
Sarah Balke: Great. Thank you so much. Well, back in early June, we had a great chat with Greg Kurtzer from Rocky Linux. He was joined with Javier, our open source evangelist, and benny from Alma Linux. The premise of that webinar was to talk about the enterprise Linux landscape and really, especially with the CentOS 7 going end of life, kind of where to go from here. Two weeks after that webinar, Red Hat made an announcement where they changed their source code availability for their RHEL, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Tell us a little bit about that change and how it affected Rocky Linux.
Brian Clemens: So the most visible part of the change was that Red Hat stopped making the RHEL source code available on git.centos.org and GitLab. The RHEL source code was previously available there under the C8, C9, C7 tags, et cetera, and now all that remains is the CentOS stream source. There were some smaller changes that happened as part of that, including a feed that we used to keep watch of changes of RHEL source code was no longer updated, et cetera, et cetera. And that's something that we're not particularly unused to. For example, Red Hat has previously tried to prevent us from retrieving Errata from systems before. So trying to deny us access to systems is just par for the course. Actually, these changes happened before the announcement and we weren't sure if it was just a mistake. So we had already sort of manually adapted to those changes and we're just exploding source RPMs in order to get the source beforehand and after the announcement, we had it automated shortly. So you essentially had no impact on our ability to remain one compatible.
Related videos:
How to Get Involved With the Rocky Linux Community: • Video
What's Next for Rocky Linux: • The Future of Rocky Linux: What Comes Next?
Has Rocky Linux Had to Adjust the Goals of the Community?: • Video
Red Hat's Code Change Announcement: The End for Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux? • Video
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