Forking RHEL and Application Development – Javier Perez, Perforce Software

This is Techron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throwaway here with Javier Perez is Chief Evangelist and senior Director of Product Management for Pro Force, and we're talking about all these different flavors of real that are starting to emerge in the wake of some business decisions that Red Hat made about licensing in terms thereof. Javier, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Mike. Good to talk to you again. So, as I understand it now, there's a couple of forks of Rel that are being made available, and folks are a little bit worried about, well, what will be the compatibility between these things going forward?

Perhaps there might be some legal issues going around. So what exactly should development teams be taken away from all of this? What should they be concerned about and how should they proceed?

Yeah, so, uh, maybe if we, we step back, uh, a little bit, uh, the, how all this, how we got here. Um, it, it was all about Santos, right? Santos Linux, which for, for many years, uh, um, more than 10 years actually, uh, was around, uh, as a, basically a copy, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So, uh, the way it ended working, and we can, we can go back and, and talk about the, the Santos community, but the way it ended working was, uh, you know, every time there was a new version of rl then, you know, a few days later, uh, there would be a Santos version without, you know, the Red Hat branding. And, you know, without the, without the, the, the logos and, uh, maybe almost minor, minor updates, but it was what companies consider what everyone will consider, uh, compatible operating system, right? So your same applications could run on Santos and then run on, uh, on rail.

Some, some companies might just, you know, pay for the production licenses of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then have their development environments on the free open source. Santos. Um, then, um, December 8th, 2020, the end of life for Santos was announced and the kind of the, the, the community, the, the Santos community and Red Hat, which basically was driving the community, they decided to move into something else called Santos Stream, different model, different d different, um, uh, rolling release.

And what that created was basically this gap, right? We won't, we're not gonna be able to have Santos anymore. It's going end of life.

Santos version six is already end of life. A year later, Santos eight went end off life. And now actually Santos seven is the one that is going end of life, the last one, uh, in June, 2024.

So we have less than a year, uh, now. So at that point, when that was announcement of the end of life, uh, then a couple of, um, actually more than a couple of, um, Linux distribution, uh, came up, uh, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, among a few others. But those two are the ones that had came the most traction, uh, sponsorships, developers.

And they were doing the same, just taking the, the copy of Rail and then making, making that then their own version, right? Still, uh, going with the promise of what they call bulk for bulk compatible, right? So any application on rail will also run on Rock, Linux or Linux.

Now the final, and just going back to your question, the, the latest announcement by Red Hat two no longer made available that copy of Rail and saying, look, you go through the, um, central stream distribution if you want a copy there or there, all, if you're a customer, you have access to the source code. That's what created a lot of, uh, uh, confusion, obviously a lot of criticism. And here's where we are, where we are today, where, um, the, these two distributions are approaching this in a different ways.

Uh, but they both want to keep having their customers in, in this case, developers, organizations, operations teams, to continue to be compatible on their applications, right? Uh, uh, so they don't have to go and modify things or, you know, completely change things if they change to a, a different line of distribution. So which distribution should people be focused on then going forward?

Is it the cento stream or is it these other derivatives that have come up and what's the difference ultimately? Yeah, and if, if you wanna stay with, uh, a derivative for basically the same compatibility where your apps still run the same, you don't have to modify your apps. Um, you have, um, well, at the moment, you, you are in Santos, by the way.

There are thousands and thousands of deployments still in Santos. We, we did a an hour yearly survey, the state of open source report, uh, we got a number of 15% of organizations in the world are still with, uh, Santos deployments. But 20% of the large organizations are still with Santos deployments.

I mean, of course takes time to, to migrate off, right? Um, so your, your in Santos, um, you can go to some of these, uh, derivatives, new distributions that, that I just mentioned. Linux.

Linux. There's, there's a, you, you kind of alluded as, uh, of, uh, an issue with, uh, licensing, and we can talk about that in just in just a second because there, there's also the, the risk there, right? What if they don't have the same access?

What if they no longer become, you know, bulk book for bulk compatible? Um, there's actually, uh, Oracle Linux who also, you know, they have, uh, announced that they have actually criticized this whole situation. Oracle Linux actually was also has been a copy of for many years.

Um, and, and even SUSE announced that they are gonna fork rail and they're gonna create their own distribution, which is very, very interesting because suse, it's, it's different, right? It's a different, different branch, different, completely different, or not completely, but different Linux distribution there. And now they are announcing that they're gonna do like a, a, a rail compatible.

Um, and so, so they'll have like very different, uh, within SUSE distributions. Um, so you have those, those options. And then the option that we proposed that at Open Logic is, well, why don't you wait, take a reader, wait until this, uh, uh, situation settles.

And, uh, and for the meantime you can get external or extended long-term support, which means once the, the, it's an end of life, like the case of Santo six and Santos eight, uh, get someone that will provide, uh, fixes for high severity cvs, high severity vulnerabilities. In other words, extending the, the community long-term support into just addressing at least the security aspect, right? At least addressing the, the high severity vulnerabilities.

Do you think people will pick one of these and go with it and standardize on that? Or will we wind up with scenarios where different teams within organizations may start from different points with different operating systems and we're gonna have something of a management headache down the road? Yeah, it looks like, uh, you know, different distributions like Ubuntu and suse are gaining traction, right?

Like getting more, more users. So that's one, one area. Now, if you have an application that has been around for a long, long time, you know, it, it, it's a significant effort to move it to a diff completely different distribution.

Because what it means is the packages, and there are, they could be hundreds of packages that make the Linux distribution, they could be different, right? So your app could be, will behave very different, might need many fixes, many updates. So the, the migration could be very challenging.

If they are starting a, you know, a brand from scratch, they're starting a new application, a new deployment looks like those cases everywhere, they're moving to, to some other Linux distributions. Now, I, I had to say in the case of Rocky Linux and, and, and Alma Linux, um, they have, uh, very sizable now communities, right? So they have many contributors, they have, uh, sponsors by the way.

We, we do sponsors the both foundations, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and the Alma Linux, uh, OS foundation. Um, because you have the sponsors, you have a lot of organizations that are gonna go and, and, and use those, uh, those, uh, uh, distributions. Now, really, the question mark today is how close they're gonna be to re or if they're gonna start completely doing their own thing.

Uh, they've been diff separate different announcements. In the case of, uh, Rocky Linux, they are very much saying, we're gonna maintain the book to book. In fact, um, based on G P A licenses, we can have access to the source code and we can compare, um, you know, what we're doing with the resource code and give you something very, very similar.

Uh, Alma Linux had made a little bit different announcement. Uh, they said, well, we are gonna work with the Santos Stream community. Um, we no longer going to be Bo for Bo from compatible, but what we're gonna do is have your binaries compatible.

So meaning your applications will still run the same in our distribution without being identical distribution. So they're a little bit different, different approaches. Uh, but I, I, I, frankly, I honestly think that they're, they're there for the long run, uh, in, in those two distributions they're gonna be around for, for some time, even if the things change, right?

Even if they don't, identical to, to the Red Hat Enterprise Limits. What do you ascribe as the motivations for all of this? Because, you know, looking at it from the outside in, a lot of it folks are like going, why are you folks all arguing about this stuff?

You're all free open source software. So what's at stake here? It it sometimes, uh, you step back and you say, well, there's a little bit too much noise about, uh, something very, very small.

The, the fact that rail no longer or Red Hat no longer makes it so easy, just, just publicly available for anyone, the source code, uh, basically they said it, it's like, we're not in the business. So making it easier for other companies to make a bus, you know, build a business on, on top of this. And, and they're within, in my opinion, within the the G P L standards, they're distributing the source course to their customers, and that with, that they comply with, with G P L.

And, and I know I'm actually a former, uh, red Hatter many years ago, and, and I know they have really good, uh, lawyers, specialists on all of these, uh, open source licenses. So I think that that's covered. It's more about if they're gonna be other loopholes in terms of getting the, the source code that might affect these other, uh, distributions.

The only one really affected by an announcement was this, this new distribution, Rocky and Alma, in terms of existing customers using, using Rail or existing customers using Santos. Well, now it's just, you know, let's wait until we know for sure what what's gonna happen, right? What's, how this, and, and I always say by the way, that, you know, the big test is gonna be the next minor version.

93, uh, with version nine three of r l and then version nine three of Bro Linux, Alma Linux, Oracle, uh, Linux, and, and many other probably new ones. That's when we'll be able to compare and see if, if, if your applications are still compatible. You alluded to this, but I think one of the bigger issues is gonna be, there's a tendency for developers to build stuff on their own machines, and then they try to deploy it in a production environment, and lo and behold it doesn't work.

And they stand there and they go, well, it worked on my machine. Is that gonna happen more often as a result of this? Because we will see developers having some variant of Linux on their machine that's slightly different than the variant that's in the production environment.

That's a risk. Uh, that's absolutely the, the main risk, right? And, and that means also time, right?

It's like now you have trouble putting your applications in, in production. Now it's gonna take longer. Now it's just gonna have to deal with all things.

And that was the nice thing of having Santos and, and Rail and, and frankly, um, you know, I think Rail or Red Hat, you know, they knew that there was gonna be few conversions of customers using Santos to rail, but it was a way to maintain the community in a way to get, you know, these users on something compatible. Um, so yes, that, that's, that's, that's the risk, right? And that's where, uh, you know, I'm recommending, you know, we'll have to wait, right?

Wait for the dust to settle, wait for the next release, and we then will be able to compare, you know, how different, and by the way, every application, every app is different. So some of them might be completely, significantly affected. Some others will just work exactly the same.

Mm-hmm. So what's your best advice to the folks in the middle of all of this? What should they be thinking about?

What should they be kinda, uh, maybe putting in place to kind of hedge their bets a little bit and prevent some of this stuff from becoming an issue? Yeah, no, I mean, what I'm recommending is, is for the moment is, is is weight. Um, there, there options as I, as I said, you know, we, we, uh, we, we offer like extended long-term support for, for Santos.

So, so you can have a wrong wave, but by the way, migrations don't think take place in a couple of days, right? You have to plan, then you have to test them, you know, depending on the size of the applications. So, so just to give you runway in, in your migration of Santos, you know, get some someone that will provide, you get, get, I mean, in this case, we are offering open logic is offering now what we call a Santos Lt s long-term support, which is basically patches post 10 of life patches for high severity, uh, uh, vulnerabilities.

That's, that's one way to go it. Now, if you're starting from a scratch, uh, brand new deployment, brand new application, yeah, you, you, you probably makes more sense to go to another stable Linux distribution or, or, you know, go for the commercial version, right? Uh, I'm a, I'm an open source advocate.

I'm an open source evangelist, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with, you know, going with the, with the commercial version, right? Um, and, and we can talk about some of the, the, you know, ethics and some of the discussions that have happening around this, but it's, you have the option, you always have the option to, to, to do some work with some open source software, which has a stable, it's been around for a long time, good, important that they have good communities, many contributors sponsors that, that makes a huge difference. Versus other open source that, you know, might have just one developer working on it, right?

Which, which there are many cases like that. So, you know, prepare and, and stay up to date, right? Or, you know, I, I, so I'm, so I'm one of those that are, you know, keeping, uh, keeping an eye on, on everything, on the news and announcements.

There was an article, uh, over the weekend, uh, with some, some critics in some cases about Santos Stream. So keeping an eye on, on what's going on. Um, and, and then, you know, I think the, definitely the next version, it's, is what we have to wait to see.

Mm-hmm. So do I kinda just stay where I am today or should I start and maybe spinning up some things to experiment with some of the stuff so at least I know what's going on? I mean, what is the definition of keeping an eye on things?

Do I just kind of watch, read the news of the day, or should I be standing up some proof of concepts just to be sure? Well, absolutely. There's, there's, uh, uh, if there's time now, actually, I will also always recommend to, to the plan ahead and with plenty of time to test your applications and test in potentially other distributions.

Um, I really, I would recommendation there is really to kind of, you can do, do all that in preparation. If it's, if you are planning to move to a, a different, completely different distribution, uh, if it's more to stay within, um, Linux, Santos Stream, Alma Linux, maybe, maybe, maybe wait for the next release. Get, uh, patches for severity, uh, high, uh, high severity vulnerabilities, especially if you're have Santos eight.

Um, get that while, while, while we see what's, what's coming on the next version. Um, you know, there are many possibilities there, but absolutely plan ahead, start thinking on your migration. And then you have, you have, you can have runway, you can have time.

All right, folks, well, you heard it here. It's time to take a good long look before you decide the leap onto something new and different and think through what you're gonna do next. But keep an eye on everything.

'cause the conversation is ongoing at the very least. And who knows, maybe we'll have a kumbaya moment someday. Javier, thanks for being on the show.

My Pleasure. All right, back to you guys in the studio.