How AlmaLinux Came to Be Fixing Bugs Ahead of a Content Creation-Focused Open-Source Event

We can file this as a plug if we wish, Christine said. “I’m basically writing it because… well, you can color me impressed by an Enterprise Linux distribution that listens to its users and is quick to action. That’s a little old fashioned for the digital age, isn’t it?” We’re filing it as an interesting trip down the rabbit hole that’s Christine’s mind.

This is a story about a software project and a small Linux Foundation-sponsored conference for a niche audience that’s generally beneath the radar.

The software project is AlmaLinux. The conference is Open Source Days, a one-day event which will happen on Sunday in Denver, although I could just as easily say that it’s SIGGRAPH, a larger and more established event that will start Sunday and run through Thursday, also in Denver. SIGGRAPH is also pretty old as far as computer conferences go, having been held every year since 1974.

AlmaLinux is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone with a difference, insofar as it’s not really a clone in the classic sense. Unlike all, or at least most, of the other RHEL clones it’s not completely a copy-and-paste of Red Hat’s code (although it’s a lot of that), but more of an attempt to exactly duplicate RHEL’s capabilities, look, and feel. Basically, it’s attempting to do — and actually doing — what all the RHEL clones do, even if some of the code is recreated and doesn’t exist in RHEL.

This comes with some advantages — the main one being that Alma devs can patch stuff like security holes and bugs that for some reason Red Hat is choosing to leave alone unless an exploit in the wild develops. As it turns out, users like it when security holes and bugs are patched, even when they’re considered to be minor by the folks upstream.

But I digress…

Making a Short Story Long

AlmaLinux devs have been fixing security glitches on their own since April. They’re qualified for this since many of the devs come out of TuxCare, a division of CloudLinux which has been patching officially dead versions of Linux distributions for ages. Now the distro is making the next logical move by applying patches to fix bugs (the kind that aren’t features in disguise) that are bothering users in addition to fixing security issues.

I discovered this fact today while trying to drum up some readers for FOSS Force on LinkedIn, when I ran across a post from AlmaLinux that had been shared by benny Vasquez, who among other things is the chairperson at AlmaLinux Foundation.

“A regression in glibc has recently been causing instability for software commonly used by our VFX users, preventing users from upgrading to enterprise Linux 9.4,” the post said. “As the fix is available upstream we’re considering releasing it, but we need testers!”

“Wow! Cool!” I said. Well, I didn’t really say it — it was more of an amplified thought.

Then I thought… well, maybe I actually said this part out loud, sort of under my breath, “And they’re seeking help from their community. Now ain’t that just the spirit of open source?”

I was having a Homer Simpson moment.

A Trip to a Little Conference

Then I had another Wow! moment — or it might have been an Aha! moment, sometimes I have trouble telling the two apart.

VFX means “visual effects,” right? This was importantant, because just a week or so earlier I had seen another post from Vasquez in which she was plugging the fact that AlmaLinux was going to have a presence at this year’s Open Source Days conference, which I didn’t even know existed. The Aha! or Wow! part was because when I looked the conference up I saw that it’s devoted entirely to “visual effects, animation, and digital content creation.”

Hmm…

Well, maybe it wasn’t Wow! or Aha! Maybe, just maybe, it was just… cool beans!

Here the folks at Alma are going to be taking part in a cool and groovy — and very esoteric — conference, and during the final days before the conference happens the Alma Community and Arty Video Folks have already made friends enough that Alma’s going to help them get a patch in place so that their video effects stuff will be bug free — or at least have one fewer bug.

Now ain’t that just the spirit of open source?

But I repeat myself.

How Do They Do That?

That got me wondering how the folks at AlmaLinux and how the folks at Open Source Days ever managed to develop a relationship with so much damn synergy (and here, I hope you’re paying attention and notice how I’ve managed to work the important keyword “synergy” into this story so that Google will send loads of traffic to this page).

At about this same time, I was contacted by some PR fellow contracted to AlmaLinux to see if I knew that Alma was going to do a bug-fix instead of a security patch and that they were seeking testers.

“Yup, I heard about that,” I told him. “I’m wondering how the synergy of that relationship came about. Can you ask her?”

I could’ve just asked her myself — in fact I was going to — but since he was now in the conversation I figured I might as well sorta “cc him in” as they say.

“Huh?” he emailed back.

“I noticed that the flaw that’s being patched is VFX, or visual effects, so I figure that addressing the bug issue is somehow tied to the fact that AlmaLinux will
be taking part in Open Source Days,” I explained. “Could I get a quote on that?”

“I’m on it,” he pinged me, evidently happy that he might actually be going to produce some media attention for his client. He pinged right back with the quote from Vasquez.

“I typically select events where our community is already gathering, and that’s what put Open Source Days and SIGGRAPH on my radar,” she said. “They’re both in Denver. It’s solid timing for us to be able to have truly deep conversations with this segment of our community.”

Huh?

That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t say anything about synergy or any of the high minded things that tech marketing dudes and dudettes are always talking about. Never mind that Vasquez definitely isn’t a marketing person (I mean that in a good way). I wanted the type of quote that was full of synergy that can only come from agility and looking at all of creation through a single pane of glass.

Oh, and one full of buzzwords.

So I pinged the PR guy.

“I was hoping more for something about how the video effects community at Open Source Days was the one being served by this patch, yadda, yadda, yadda, and how this was just one example of how AlmaLinux can work with…”

“Would you like me to go back to benny and see if she is available to expand upon it further?” the PR guy interrupted in another email. “Happy to try. Or a little too late for that at this point?”

“It’s never too late to give benny a hard time,” I answered. “It would help.”

While I waited for PR Dude to play go-between, I thought about how Open Source Days is actually a one day event and how that means that Open Source Days should probably be called Open Source Day, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

I finally received the email with benny’s reaction to my comment on her last answer.

“It’s fortuitous timing for us that this bug most highly impacts the VFX community, because that is exactly who we’ll be able to talk to when we’re at Open Source Days this weekend, and SIGGRAPH next week,” she said.

And just as Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house in Alaska in 2008, here in 2024 I could see benny Vasquez rolling her eyes at me in my mind.

Everything in this story actually happened — except for the stuff that didn’t.