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.”
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… :/