Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordShredda | Hacker News Reader

NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts

View on HN

https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view

links to "SATPC0031698 Tab 04 SOW.pdf"

which has 2 line items,

- CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2023-May 31, 2024

- CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2024-May 31, 2025

Quantity of 3 for each of them.

If the info in this thread is accurate, it is for 3 (three) workstations, I would call it a tiny deal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968

Shouldn't be of relevance.

Yeah this decision had to have been in discussion for 6 months or more, maybe even 2 years back to the CentOS Stream decision. It didn't happen because a few days ago NASA bought support for 3 Rocky licenses

I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL.

My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a challenge.

If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the mirror before they malign other distributions.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...

NASA's IT used to be split into the field centers and a central core IT organization. The field centers managed their own stuff, but anything agency-wide was handled by the core IT organization. Central IT also usually won out when there was a conflict.

When NASA combined their disparate field center mail systems into one (OneNASA and later NOMAD) massive mail system in 2006-2008 they deployed everything that wasn't the squishy Exchange underbelly on SuSE Enterprise 10.

The field centers were very invested in RHEL. Mostly for scientific software and Oracle.

JPL has traditionally been separate from the rest of NASA and works with CalTech for their infrastructure.

The US Government has been sour on large contractors for almost 10 years now, but the quandary is how to prevent the small contractors they support from becoming the dinosaurs they hate? For a while OSC O/ATK was a darling, but NG gobbled them up. Same thing with Millennial (now Boeing). Space-X is probably too big for acquisition now, so they are on course to become just another dinosaur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com