Ask Me Anything (AMA) with OpenELA

his opinion quite yet let everybody introduce himself first yeah Allen welcome to the channel we really appreciate you being here hey thanks I'm I'm way impressed you guys I'm way impressed my first time here so thank you for joining go ahead and introduce yourself tell us who you are okay I'll tell you I apologize the lighting's not the best today I'm I'm uh roaming around and uh so I'm I'm actually from Susa I'm in the office of the CTO and my role there is to direct um new initiatives watch the new technologies coming out in the open source industry so very much an open source

guy uh my life has been all around open source and all things open source so I've played many different roles and and within the community thank you very much appreciate it again welcome glad glad that you are here Greg I I guess you can go now who you'll be pretty sure you've been on here one or once or twice but it's been a while so it is time to introduce yourself again hi everybody I'm Greg that's all that needs to be said thank you very much no I never know what to say that's great that's pretty funny Greg all right then I guess we can

go ahead and continue having a strong opinion and then you just say hi I'm Craig lots of other opinions that aren't about me we'll fix it in a minute Alan don't worry well this one is about you though because how should we be saying it open Ela openella open yellow so basically what you're saying am I right or is Zayn right so that is what I'm waiting for yes carefully Mary [Music] why is having to think about it that's good well it's not straight up favorites I just don't want to say anybody's wrong um so I'm wrong it's fine we'll still be friends I promise

um so it brings me to a story um I think I said this one before but you know the way way way way back in the chaos incento stays uh Lance Davis proposed the name Centos to me uh and at the time Centos was called chaos El and um you proposed the name Santos and I said I love it I said but I gotta say like I I really don't like like scent OS because Cent OS kind of separates the oh the OS the the operating system from the the scent incent is kind of I know it's you know it's it's a hundred but it's

generally kind of considered a you know a monetary amount like a small one but a monetary amount and it's free so that's an infinite increase in cost I said so I don't like that I said so you know zentos Centos however you want perfect great love it oh God like no no so of course about 50 of the community for that point on proceeds to call it Centos um for the first year maybe two um it used to annoy me used to bother me but then I grew up and I realized it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter wow so there's hope for all of

us so I have to say Rhodes I think you're the first I've actually heard say open Ella and some reason it reminds me of Nutella well I mean who doesn't like a little nutty chocolate goodness yeah right we'll spread that around that works perfect I'm already getting comments Jonathan thanks for watching it sounds like money I've never knew how to pronounce whatever that's supposed to be I don't know I will butcher that yeah not even trying that one so I call it I call it oh and there used to be a wave file I think it was even in the kernel source that used to

say hello I am Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux Linux way way back in the day if anyone remembers that um I and everyone's free to pronounce it however they want um but I pronounce it I'm open Ela yeah okay there's a lot of comments being come in hello open Ela Christopher died thanks for watching I love saying it open Ella thank you but I am happy to just say it that way to myself oh are are you giving me some advice I feel like this is good advice I'll I'll take it I'll take it Chris thank you I kind of like Oella oh voila

oh Ella there you go kind of like that we can have some fun with the name can't we yeah a whole whatever with this we should get a whole git repository of people recording wav files saying hello my name is I pronounce [Laughter] all the different permutations of it you know what if we do that I'll put it to music oh that would be fun perfect yeah that would be fun Rose maybe maybe you would dance to it I will definitely dance I will definitely do an interpretive oh it didn't even take encouragement look at that umbrella so it's funny I was looking at that

and I didn't I didn't get it until you said it that's pretty funny that's that's creative whoever that was that was creative Dave the only thing missing from openella is you because the focus is on your and not the you love oh there we go and now I get his comment I like that that's cute I like that one too but oh it sounds like Euless and I was like no we don't want to go there somebody write that down that's a good one so Paul actually has a good one too that I really like whatever that one there there we go citro vanilla bug

repellent get it bug repellent thanks Paul oh he's gonna be creative thank you Krista thank you very much yes song and dance and all that so what is it that we're even talking about and whose idea was it is that too deep of a question maybe we don't want to talk about that ask me anything there you go so um okay I keep reading these [Laughter] um we all have that stuck in our head now I'm not even going to try and sing thanks Jonathan from that thank you so uh what was the question again what is that thing yeah what are we talking about

umbrellas Ella's bugs I mean we're going in the direction but like give us an overview of what even is this open Ela Greg sure so um open Ela really came to be just through the collaborative Nation nature of Open Source and organizations that are really trying to solve similar problems and um uh ciq Oracle and Susa all came together to see you know how do we how do we leverage each other's work in an open and collaborative way and and then share that and collaborate further with the with the wider and generalized open source community and that was really the idea just just how do

we um how do we rely on the the resilience and all the benefits of open source for this critical platform that we the user base our customers and everyone in the community seems to rely on and uh and that was really kind of just the the basic idea to start off with so I feel like this has been a conversation Greg I know you and I have had for a long time uh I know Seuss has been talking about this for a long time too but why now I'll let Alan answer that one so this is this is something that's building up for a long

time and um we are users and and consumers have kind of it's actually been kind of surprising but they've seen the train coming down the tracks right and it just hit a culmination point a few weeks ago where it was like okay something's got to be done right and um we're making it happen and as Greg said you know the way he described it it's perfect for open source right to collaborate together in an open transparent Way It just fits it's a good fit and the the beauty of this is we're not coming in with naive cold feet right we're coming in having experience and

knowledge having built this stuff for a long time and so we're off we're hot and running yeah that's fantastic I'm excited about this whole thing I think the community seems to be very excited about it we've heard a lot of fantastic feedback it's been very exciting but from my perspective seeing Oracle to say ciq together is what's exciting for me that that really shows the value and what we're trying to do here we're trying to push forward and I would love if you guys could talk about that value a little bit so I have something I want to say on this and sorry for jumping

right in there um this brought together not only these organizations but brought together a number of really good people um I'm very grateful that I've had the opportunity to work with Alan and with the um the Sousa team um I'm very grateful that I was able to that I'm able to work with with Wim with Edward and the Oracle team as well and what I've learned from this is not only are we all trying to solve very similar problems um but honestly and not to sound cliche on this but the community's full of really cool and great people and it's just it's an honor to

actually kind of expand out of where I think we would have just been within our with our own organizations and actually start start working together in a broader Community it really means something and um and it's and so far it's just been it's been an amazing um journey and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this is going to go and what comes next great thank you Greg so we have a um open Ela I'm doing my best here open Ela uh slack Channel as well that anyone can join and kind of keep up to date with things yes yeah yeah yeah we are all

on so I'm just giving our people A little nudge to give that link in the in the chat yeah we wanted to we wanted to get something early I remember when William and Greg and I were talking about it it was important that we get an open Communication channel up early right so it's funny because you can get in the argument people go well we're not ready we haven't got all the ducks in line and whatever and it's just the opposite like no let's let's put it out there we want everybody to come in and join and help us figure it out so do we

have all the answers no are we working on them yeah we want your input we want you to be part of it right so so join Slack recognize we're you know we don't have all the answers figured out we have a very good idea of what we're after I want to accomplish um so that we've put that out there right so the mo the focus that we're after and so forth but all the t's on githubs or whatever we're still figuring that out it's almost really my next question is I know this is early days this thing just got announced has it even been two

weeks yet where are we in the process so we have communications set up like where are we now what's coming soon what are we doing so um to announce this we had to have a few things already kind of defined an emotion and so uh Alan myself Wim uh Thomas and others uh we we've all already been talking about this for oh goodness for for a little while now and um so we we finally got it to the point where you know we had a we have a charter um we have a lot of that Charter has been recapitulated on our about page um we're

in the process of forming it as a non-profit uh legal entity um those of you have done non-profits no it's not a quick like TurnKey type thing it takes a little while and there's a number of steps involved in doing that and so a whim welcome and so we've been um we've been really just focused heads down on on getting that now now that that's been out there we've we've spun up the slack we have a lot of people in the community that have joined and and want to be part of this uh now we're actually working on the technical environment um so we started

off with a uh I I don't want to say a small team because it's not a small team but a smaller group I should say or a representative group uh to to start identifying what are the kind of core tenants development wise and what are we going to be building uh moving forward and what are the requirements of that and uh we're actually just about to the point where we're going to start releasing those documents and uh and and once we have that done and we've kind of have the foundation done at that point now we're really not only inviting people to join this Vision

but now we're actually going to be inviting people to actually join and be part of the project itself so very much looking forward to that and that should be coming here very very soon uh now I'm going to be quiet and uh I want to say hi to him welcome hey sorry I had some electrical work going on at home and my network was down but I'm back up so sorry for being late and no no no worries if you don't mind Wim if you would introduce yourself to everybody sure appreciate you being here but tell us who you are sure all right so my

name is William Cole carts I I work for Oracle and have worked there for 20 27 28 years something like that 28 years um and one of the teams in in my org is the Oracle Linux team so we've been doing all the Linux work at Oracle since the early late 90s early 2000s but really mostly starting the early 2000s and so the the Oracle Linux team is a is is a big part of my day-to-day job and of course we're very excited about what's going on with the open Ela and um it's been a very interesting last few months always something new going on

in in the open source and and certainly Linux world so uh never at all moment but I think um you know certain events have gotten people to come together more and and I think the the result really is that that we this is an opportunity to make it easier to be more out in the open than than it was before and and do some shared work to be more efficient so it's actually in in many ways it's it's a it's been a in some ways a blessing right that that we can we can do this work together and you know a lot of work that

that we will now do jointly we've all been doing individually as companies and and not just companies but also communities there's there's lots of uh Community project versions out there that that do something similar where folks working for from you know where their day job something different will will be doing something similar and basically reinvent the wheel in a certain if you want to call it that and so we have lots of processes in place today for QA for automation for validating patches for doing check-ins with with sign off buys is like what happens with the Linux kernel those are sort of the types of

structure that we've built into our environment for for Oracle Linux but now we can all work together to bring that more broadly and you know folks that Folks at in Greg's team and Alan steams they they are doing similar stuff so now we just pick the one that scales the best and uh provides the best solution and others can just you know hopefully take some of that work in and not reinvent a wheel I think that's fundamentally what this comes down to right and um so so it's very exciting I I think we're on the right track here thank you for that one so you

kind of alluded to and touched on a little bit uh they weren't open in all of this so open is important I know we at ciq have talked about the openness and why we wanted this to be open but I would love to get Alan Wim and then Greg last um your views on why it's important for this to be open for everybody and I'll start with Alan so so it's not not just open but neutral right because there's lots of different ways we could have done this and so Greg went into it a little bit how we're setting up a a 501c6 right and

we did that we're working on that it takes time I always have a lot of people say well it's really easy you just go to whatever state and file some paperwork I'm going that's the easy part um but figuring out how to keep it open and how to ensure that it's it's a neutral um playground for everybody right they can come in and participate that's not so easy but it's extremely critical and so that's that's the that's the thought process that's really going in there is to make sure that everybody can come in and feel comfortable that they can participate and you know be a

be a important part of this thank you so the reason we did Oracle Linux um was because we felt there was a need to in our world a to have a better support experience for our customers and what they got at that point in time was not providing that and so that got us into the Linux support business that's always been for us fundamentally what it was about it wasn't about the code it wasn't about you know patches it was about a customer as an issue they need immediate support and we need to help them right that's why we got into into the Linux business

and you know I don't want to talk too much about our stuff but I think it helps set some some answer some of the questions we could have built our own Linux distribution technically it's not rocket science but the point was we didn't want a fragment the market even more so we just said okay the source code is open we're competing on support we're competing on the quality of support for open source so we just provide the same base customers have a choice if they don't like us they can go back if they like them better no problem you know we want Linux to be

good because it's about our products in Oracle on Linux and so that was fundamentally our charger since the beginning and still is to date and so um when I hear some people I'm not going to name names and certainly not you know specifically about stuff but when I hear folks say how you know they're putting a lot of effort into stuff and as such they feel like the the code they got from an upstream project which was not written by them in the first place should be locked down for paying customers I find that odd because um as an example you know one of the

guys in my team just finished building online xfs repair he worked on this for years with other people two three people full time paid for because xfs online file system repair is important well guess which distributions use xfs as the base file system right so that's gonna go up in there we're not going to send a bill to these other companies it's just part of hey xfs is important we're providing that code and it's not ours it's part of the project and so for for folks to to claim that the work invested in the source code is somehow making it okay to lock that part

down when it's not their source code to begin with I don't want to start the whole conversation about you know companies that that have their own products and and start with one model and then change to another one that's a whole different world this is a world of ten thousands of packages written by hundreds of thousands of people out in the world that become a collection and all those folks have worked really hard on that including us including Souza including Greg's team including so many people so claiming some form of ownership of that because there's some Tail land work that happens which is a lot

right I'm not diminishing the amount of work it takes to build a distribution it's not it's not zero but there's a lot of other people that get paid to build the stuff they depend on so it's not about the code it's about support quality it's about that's the that's the model you compete on for the service offerings and so changing that concept uh is Art to me and we're basically working to prevent that part right you like the different colors right you like the the support who you call knows what you're running and they know that market really well go there that's what fundamentally is

it's about Choice isn't it it's about enabling and keeping people giving them keeping their ability to have Choice yeah that's fantastic thank you for what for saying that web having choices really really important Craig I just want to say I I think both women Allen's um perspective on this is exactly right the one thing I'll add is my whole career even early on in my career I pivoted everything that I did my degree everything because I got I just got enamored with open source like the idea of being part of a larger Community being part of something that is freely available I said the story

before in the past but my first introduction to Linux is when we were creating a bioinformatics and genetics tool and we got some hardware and we were able to download this operating system off of our 56k modems and and then you know burnt you know burnt burn it the floppy disks and then go and install this and turn this into a Computing tool like that just that that just blew my mind like it was so amazing the fact that you can just go do that and so when we talk about even like giving back to the community giving back to like everything that this is

about this is all giving back in a matter of speaking even just using it is being part of this and um I became as I said completely enamored I changed my whole career I changed everything I was doing to go learn enough Linux go learn enough coding and open source to go be part of this because I loved it and it has fueled everything that I've done since then and this is since the mid 90s so this is over two decades now and my hair has recently turned much grayer um but yeah I mean this is like you know this is a long time standing

now and uh what we've created with with openela is really just the epitome it comes right back to the spirit and the goals and the collaborative nature of Open Source I mean for for Susa for Oracle and ciq to come together and form a relationship and a bond around this this this notion of of Open Source collaboration and let's create a foundation such that we can all now go and and build better products build better services and support and solutions for our customer base that is massive and what we're agreeing on this is let's all leverage the same Foundation such that this Foundation now becomes

not something we're competing on because choice is great for for everybody right but if you have too much of the community is bisected with incompatible solutions that doesn't help it doesn't help like people it doesn't help the users it doesn't help vendors it doesn't help people that are adding capabilities on this and you know thanks to how profoundly utilized Centos was across the ecosystem we now have a standard we have a goal in terms of compliance in terms of validation and in terms of what it is we're trying to create and we all agree that this is the foundation in which we all want to

build upon so that's open okay Greg not like that really begs the question when you're talking about a foundation I know that you guys had already mentioned you're like we're still working out the details come join the group you know we're we're going to figure all of this out but Ellen I remember an article not that long ago where you guys talked about forking is that like where we're starting here is that like the foundation of open Ela or are you guys still thinking about that well the the notion there when they used forking in the Press was if they go away we're going to

continue on right they can Fork it they can take it they can split off from what we're doing but we're coming together right and we're pushing forward and honestly I think this will turn in so so Greg and William said it correctly right we're we're here to service our customers and we want to give them that assurance that we're here for the long run whatever others do right we're here for the long run and we're going to take this forward and a lot of people are joining in and we're not going to have that fragmentation it's not going to Splinter off um so that's really

what it's about and that's really what the message was about ah thank you Alan you have a lot of questions coming in I think we should probably start addressing those from the community I have I have another one but I'm gonna wait a question does it help when I sing uh there was one about matter most first Rocky which one are we looking at here oh yes Jonathan Anderson how will open Ela establish its own identity Beyond distribution name redacted it's a great question yeah whomever would like to chime in first so I don't know if I would describe it as as even establishing its

own identity yeah um Beyond it's it's really about becoming a collaborative source for any distribution that wishes to become Downstream so uh there is of course value in in stating you know that something is is derived out of you know the collaborative effort of open Ela but that may or may not be even required like nobody has to do that like a downstream derivative would not have to say that it's you know that they are derivative of open Ela or or anything right but they are free to leverage everything we've done in open Ela in any way shape or form that that they like yeah

it I that exactly I I think there's there's some I mean it's good to have these questions because it allows us to fine-tune our conversations better and and so it's this is a great way to learn about how what people have taken away from previous conversations and and so on so so we we obviously have some some work to do in in improving our um intent in some of these cases but you know to me it's more a it's basically it's ftp.vendor.com ftp.openeela.com and anyone can go and download Source RPMs and use that to build their thing it's a you know in some ways could

say it's a collection of source code we'll do something where it's all nicely in repositories and clean which with patches and uh clear change logs and you know all that stuff so that we're very open and transparent we're not trying to obfuscate things you know the the idea of of taking the the kernel source and doing a full unpack and tar that up to provide a source code is not as nice as saying here's the original git tree and here's all the the patches and divs we applied on top so you can see clearly what we did that's the right way to do it starting

this all up just to make it harder for other people to know what the heck went in it's just ridiculous and Petty but clearly that happened about 10 years ago so anyway we're not doing that we're doing the opposite open change logs differences people know what's going on and and how's what's in there and and so so it's really about providing the code for everyone to build a distribution and whether you're part of the open Ela or not doesn't matter if it's a public access ftp.openela.com yeah I'm not saying that it's going to be FTP dot just don't take my don't take it literally yeah

I was sitting here going why you're dating but that's absolutely hey there's source code there for all this stuff and anyone that wants to build their own derivative and do their own thing or need some stuff of it it's there that's fundamentally all this is so it's not so much about yeah not so much about Identity or distribution it's here's the source code to grab to build your thing so I guess it's one of the questions that I've been getting quite a lot lately is where does this sit in terms of the open source Linux project chain or has that even been decided yet yeah

yeah so like Colonel Mainline stable fedora stream Where in that Would It Go yes yes Zayn is the answer yes yes foreign you want to take that or you want me to so I was going to try to make it a simple answer and say it's in the middle [Laughter] and it is it's in the middle right so there's upstream and there's Downstream which puts it in the middle but that's the simple answer then then my brain starts thinking about all all the things in between those words and it gets a little more complicated [Music] um but we definitely want to encourage I I think

maybe the the right answer here is we want to encourage Upstream right so we don't want to take contributions here when they should be going you know back to the kernel itself kind of thing so we're going to be very careful to try to watch and say Hey you know we like your work we like what you've done it's appropriate to check it in here or it might be appropriate to check it back up in kernel.org or wherever right and so we don't want to replace those we want to enhance what's being done upstream and make it simpler and easier for Downstream which kind of

describes this as being in the middle but again we're just going to be very careful to make sure things get redirected to the right places and if we do get patches that come in specific for open Ela whether these are upgraded package contributions Etc um you know we want to make sure that we're working with the Upstream Community to ensure that these patches are getting back in now that can not only include the uh the Upstream individual projects like the kernel but this could also include Fedora this can also include Centos stream and we're very much looking forward to being collaborative with the broader Enterprise

Linux Community as well as with the broader open source community thank you Greg more questions Jonathan how will open Ela impact existing distributions at Sousa Oracle nciq so let me let me quickly answer on the Oracle side so um you know one is right now there is no Central repository yet however we've been continuing you know nothing stopped two months ago we're still continuing with erada and Bug fixes and everything else so from a from a pure organ Linux customer interface point of view nothing has changed we do what we do we will continue to do what we do however as this comes into place

we are sharing resources to do it so in some ways you know we'll redirect stuff from ftp.openela.com.org right as I mentioned earlier so so it just makes it um we're sharing more so we're not replicating the exact same thing all multiple entities are doing and um basically it will reduce some of the work we otherwise would be doing anyway but it'll we'll have more time for you know something else and so that's fundamentally what this is it'll we will use this as a Upstream code base to build our packages um and share more stuff that's basically it so it's it's very similar for Susa so

Susa has less right which is not a uh Red Hat Downstream it's it's it's its own distribution in fact it was either the or one of the or earliest Enterprise Linux distributions right from Linux um that continues to say we'll continue to invest in slots that doesn't change we started our Liberty product line several years ago which uh was was began as as Wim was talking about earlier we wanted to ensure are being able to support our customers and a lot of our customers have mixed environments and so they they runs less there's good reasons good good reasons why they picked less you know you

talk about things like running sap in your shop it's going to run on Celeste that's not going to change our product line doesn't change but they also had reasons to pick Rel and Centos and so forth we wanted to be able to support them in in their mixed environments and so we introduced Liberty and Liberty is is is based on um on this the on this code thread so that will continue uh just as Wim says it doesn't change hasn't changed um it just enhances what we're going to be able to do for our customers going forward thank you Alan Craig um first thing I

just want to reiterate is um you know I talked a little bit about my belief in open source and um one of the things that ciq did different with Rocky is we did we we do not uh actually control Rocky like Rocky is not part of ciq um Rocky is is hosted and maintained by the rocky enterprise software Foundation I do happen to be Associated obviously with the rocky Enterprise software Foundation but it is a different organization uh the one thing I want to mention is uh the partnership that we've created is is really kind of commercially driven in the sense that it is three

commercial entities it's ciq not resf on behalf of that so uh I'm very careful when I speak or at least I tried to be on if I'm speaking on behalf of ciq or if I'm speaking on behalf of of Rocky so I'm gonna I'm gonna answer both of those uh with my ciq hat on um it is really uh it is about ciq wanting to ensure that there is a open standard for Enterprise Linux moving forward in open and freely available uh access to source code open source code which should should never be a question it should always be freely available and accessible and and

we rely on this um so we wanted to make sure and we wanted to invest to ensure that this remains a constant in the community uh from the rocky side well Rocky now has another choice on where they obtain the sources from and choice as we keep kind of coming back to choice is a good thing and so this gives Rocky the ability to continue leveraging exactly what they're doing and or extend that to Leverage What open Ela is producing and and providing back at that that back out to the community this creates absolute stability resiliency and freedom again within this whole open source El

community and that's what's so super important in my opinion about what it is that we're doing is uh you know we we've ever since the end of life of Centos this this poor Community has seen a lot of drama and the goal is to let's get beyond the drama and focus again on what we all can provide back to the community and back to our customers and and and let's stop getting everyone all shaken up about all of this and let's just focus again on we have the stable operating system foundation and let's just start building on top of that so very simple very clear

um and from an resp perspective again it just gives us the ability to have more stability and um more resiliency moving forward thank you Greg next question oh Rose you're unmute so so not cool right did you guys understand what yeah no lip syncing no um Igor hello thank you is this going to be an international standard Alan you seem very amused by this question please I'm just laughing because it just brings up all kinds of memories that I don't want to have we should have bets on if we all know you you get three guesses in the first two don't count right um the

as Wim put put it earlier this is about the co and Greg right this is about the code uh are we standardizing things as an artifact yes right I think that it's going to flow and we're gonna recognize a standard base across all of us and I think that's a very good thing because as women talked we don't want to fragment um so not fragmenting to me kind of says standard are we going to turn into a standards Organization no way is my opinion right the others might have a different opinion there but I I don't want to spend my time writing paper at this

time I want to see us get the code out yeah just put the code out there if people want to use it they use it it's just like Greg said you know it gives an extra option for distributions that are built today and it makes it easy to point your your download servers to one place rather than going and chasing things in 20 different places that's that's part of what we're what we're doing like I said earlier we're working together so that instead of all doing individual work we're sharing that stuff with everyone else does that make it a standard no it makes it a

place you can get stuff to build your thing and if you take 10 packages out of that and do your own on the rest who cares really because it's up to you to do what you want to do with it we're sharing the code that we all work on anyway full stop you know it's very kind of typical and open source I mean most people in open source focus on the source code all right most open source Community it's about you know collaborating on the source code uh from From openela perspective I don't think it's any different so is it going to be a standard

well it's not going to be a formal standard but you know it's going to be out there it's going to be free for anyone to use it is collaborative via the community um maybe indirectly which I'd call say maybe there's a standard there but but yeah um a lot of times I I tend to refer to Enterprise Linux as a standard and say you know there's an Enterprise Linux standard that we're trying to adhere to but I use that word very Loosely and possibly um incorrectly uh just being lazy with with vocabulary um it really it's an implementation so thank you I am not an

Open Source maintainer by any stretch of the imagination however I have heard occasionally there will be something that is suggested to either like a bug fix or a feature new feature or whatever that is submitted to some open source space and it is denied so who who who's making these decisions like am I is this not even an issue or is there like a little bit of hesitation or you know like who who's actually in charge who makes the decisions what if you guys disagree does that does that happen this is this is very common it is very common and open source uh there there's

a lot of um contributions to open source in many cases um it's feature requests or it's a it's a patch that that brings together brings forth a feature that may be out of scope from the project maintainer's perspective um it may not be a good implementation by the by the maintainers perspective meaning they don't like how it was coded or they think it can be coded in a different way um or maybe it conflicts with something that the contributor is is unaware of uh and they just don't they don't have enough experience as the maintainers do um of the software but long story short yeah

this does happen a lot we are currently in the process of drafting our uh policy in terms of and I think Alan kind of mentioned this uh as well um we're in the process of drafting this policy which says if you're going to be contributing here's the types of things you should be contributing here here's the types of things you should be contributing here and it kind of sets it um in it sets us there I go standard sets a standard in terms of where everything's going to go how is it going to how is it gonna be so if somebody comes along and says

here's a new patch here's a new feature new capability a new package or a package version um it gives us the ability to say no that is out of scope for this project or it's out of scope for this area of the project and maybe go to um contribs or go to somewhere else for you know to to to publish that but um even with that said there may be code that people try to publish that will be denied for other reasons like maybe licenses maybe it's not an OSI approved license and they wanted to contribute it in um or other things like there's there's

a number of reasons so yes that may end up happening we're trying to create policies and we're drafting policies that will provide guidance to the community on what should go where and and how best to do it yeah and and there's there's one other comment I would make on top of that so basically to give you an example again using our world at Oracle fundamentally oh well obviously tracks and you know it we're almost we're basically saying we're bug compatible right practically because it's the same now if a customer of ours calls us and has a problem then obviously we fix that right and and

that happens quite often where there are bugs in our Upstream vendors code and and uh even though they do so much work we do find bugs ourselves because we do a lot of work too but okay anyway um so but basically we fix bugs right and so what happens then is um we want to make sure that the customer gets the this fix and if is it if it's a a fix that should go into the Upstream project like let's say it's a Linux kernel bug you know obviously we push that Upstream make sure that it's fixed there and our other vendor can then freely

get it from Upstream um put your name on it um and basically that that's one that's one model now if if there is a fix that would break compatibility then it's not going to go into the base because we don't want to break compatibility now if a customer wants a particular thing we will work with them but the the core aspect of we need to remain fully fully compatible we're not going to deviate is is critical and if we have bug fixes we add them on top and it's pretty clear what we fixed and why and I think a similar model would fit or will

fit here just fine there's the let's say base Source package that's the same and then there's a branch that has bug fixes and if these bug fixes are critical one would hope that the Upstream vendor becomes a downstream user of that code and Bug fixes because it affects everyone not just a particular person now if somebody comes in and says well we want you to upgrade this package from A to B and B is not compatible with a well that doesn't really fit the Enterprise distribution model so that that's not something that we we can and should do in place but you know what if

somebody wants a newer version they're welcome to do it because this is a repository of source code with branches for patches and it'll be completely open and transparent so you want to add the bug fixes go for it you don't want to do that you don't have to it's just it's out there right so I think it's it's really not so much about forcing people into a certain way and taking code that that would go in a certain direction it's about being open and transparent about what we do and what's possible you want to fix you take it you don't want it you don't need

to thank you William thanks we have a few more questions Tom what's up okay Rocky Linux is using matter most why is open Ela I'm not in there using Slack I imagine it's temporary but you can probably answer that guys so this is this is a long-standing discussion with open source enthusiasts about slack and should we actually be using slack for open source projects um there's there's a lot of strong feelings within the community about this um it's it's my personal opinion that slack is very easy to to set up to stand up Etc um I don't know if this is where we're going to

be forever um but I can tell you uh it was a very fast way to to get Communications and collaboration in place and so we stood up a slack now matter most has a little bit more uh it is if you're not familiar matter most is a uh an awesome slack alternative that's open source but you do have to set up your own infrastructure um to to run it and depending on the size of the infrastructure rather the size of your your workspace uh there could be quite a bit of involved in doing that so um that's why we spun it up initially in slack

the other thing I want to mention is even though that there's a lot of uh you know opinions should we be using slack and open source or not uh there are a lot of Open Source projects that do use slack I still believe the the cloud native Computing Foundation as a whole still uses black as an example so there's definitely quite a bit of precedent there but yeah it I don't know if it'll stay stay on slack long term or not but as of right now it is thank you Greg hey Dave thanks for watching Dave so let's um create interest in participation with a

how-to video tutorial something for a beginner to what is what's DL is that download download the RPMs and spin up their own distro yeah it's a great it's a great Point actually sorry I kind of jump in on you I absolutely we need we need to do more of that and you know one of the things I I have a uh we have a a pretty sizable documentation writer team that has written its own documentation for for our stuff and so we're going to push a lot of that into uh into the open Ela repos as well because documentation is important right it's it's code

but also the Dock of the of stuff and and and some of that will be you know what that we we will share the scripts that we use internally to build our distribution and how we modify our penguin that we add to it as a trait you know as a as a as an image for booting up and you know our color scheme and stuff like that so that people can basically reuse all that stuff so yeah it we we obviously and I think and this this is part of what the added value will be of working together with as a group is there's all

the source code there's documentation there's test scripts there's there's all the different QA things that we do that might be able to be shared because they're generic enough I mean if something's really unique to our environment makes no sense but if if it's uh generic testing stuff we can certainly um and we will certainly contribute that up to the open Ela website instead of just keeping it to us one thing I can add real quick is uh in the slack Community Maxine has somebody over there who I encourage you to reach out to if you're interested in doing this has actually been toying with the

idea of doing a lot of people are familiar with Linux from scratch where you go and build a Linux distribution from scratch um she's working on Enterprise Linux from scratch and you can actually then so the tooling the scripts the documentation everything such that anybody can go out there and create um a downstream derivative of of Enterprise Linux using open Ela sources I think it's tremendous I think it's absolutely fantastic and um yeah I want to help with that in any way that I can personally even that is very cool oh yeah art isv participation yes yeah yeah I was gonna say that's an easy

that's an easy answer so I I'll just jump in here so on the side here as we started forming this I've gone off and talked to isvs and and others to say hey what do you think about this idea right so before Susa jumped in on this we I personally went out and um talk to a few right to see what they thought and they were like this is very exciting we want to be part of this so so there's a lot of interest not just from us distros right but for my SVS and and other communities that are interested as well so that was

another reason why we wanted to push things to get out the communication is so that they uh they will know how to come and start at least watching right and then be able to jump in it's great thank you Alan Dave thanks for watching Dave What could do to block what open Ela intends to do and how would open Ela respond it's an interesting question Dave [Music] um well we we can't survive many ideas wait a minute wait a minute don't give them any ideas that's the secret sauce I'm sure I'm sure this isn't news to them um but I I think the one major

thing that they can do but I I don't think that I don't think that they would do it it would be very um very bad for for Red Hat to do this would be to block the distribution or no longer distribute um permissible license software so non-copy left software uh if if they did that I feel as though the backlash from the community would be would be massive um and it and to be honest it won't break what we're doing it'll just make our job a little bit more difficult um but it will be a significant amount of backlash if if Red Hat tries to

do something along those lines um that's I think the big the big issue uh the big thing that they can do there may be others but you know who knows yeah yeah I would say one thing that I feel pretty comfortable about about is the compatibility right so whether it's El seven eight or nine which will be around for many many years no matter what happens tomorrow next month next year the compatibility for the lifetime of those things I have zero concerns about that whatsoever no matter what happens if there's a 10 whatever that would look like but we'll take that when when the time

comes but right now no concerns yeah Ally no I well said um not sure I could top that the only other thing I was going to add is if you look at the majority of what's in use out there it's all on seven so there's a long life cycle we've got to go through who knows where we'll all be 50 years from now anyway I'm a good idea actually wow you guys this has been so much fun Wim what a blessing to meet you thank you so much Alan nice to meet you too Greg always fun to see you Zane you're amazing so if you

guys are watching please give us a like give us a comment we will continue to answer questions and do more amas thank you so much for stopping by and check out our slack channel for now open Ela thank you have a great day thank you very much thank you everyone thanks man thanks Alan Greg good to see you [Music] thank you