6 ms·

The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

by gaius 8y ago

rwmj 8y ago
So I work for Red Hat and the truth is no one will know until after the acquisition, but there are certainly no plans for that, nor have I heard anyone even discussing such a thing. CentOS is a valuable part of Red Hat and an important part of keeping users in the ecosystem even if they're not paying us, so it wouldn't really make any sense. IBM aren't stupid (despite nonsense that people write online), and Red Hat is a cash machine and they'd be stupid if they messed with a proven model which works.
- ianai 8y ago
  Seems like supporting and incorporating RHEL support into IBM’s business is the reason they bought RHEL. They effectively grew their business contracts with the addition of all the RHEL contracts. If anything, I would expect business as usual for their business customers. It was a really obvious market move in hindsight.
  - merb 8y ago
    my guess is they bought redhat because it bought coreos. and ibm wanted that, too.
    - recentdarkness 8y ago
      That’s a big premium over this what? 250 million?
tapoxi 8y ago
It would do damage to the brand, and then you'd see developers fork Fedora and build their own RHEL-like "enterprise Linux".
kbenson 8y ago
IBM has never struck me as that clueless about open source, and I imagine Red Hat management would fight that as much as possible realizing how much of a long term strategic blunder it would be.
reacharavindh 8y ago
CentOS is being used by a lot of HPC shops, academia and research units like one where I administer a HPC. For the number of cores that HPC shops run, the bill would become FAT real soon if we have to pay for OS. I'd imagine that if IBM messed with CentOS, it'd be called out for being incredibly dumb about RH business, and there would emerge an open fork of RHEL that is not owned by IBM like CentOS is. To give you an idea, we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like. If IBM touches CentOS, the whole domino falls and we start looking for alternatives.
- 51lver 8y ago
  I haven't used scientific linux since version 6, but it was a very nice centos alternative at the time.
  - lima 8y ago
    Still is.
LinuxBender 8y ago
Regardless of who owns Redhat, they still have to provide the source RPM's for most of the packages. The best they could do is change the build format enough and often enough to make it painful to repackage. I don't envision them doing this however. That would force a lot of people away from Redhat based distros and guarantee barring conversion to RHEL entitlements.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 8y ago
From the people I know using huge amounts of centos in production, they're not going to pay for RHEL, if centos becomes non viable they'll be switching to debian-stable and debian-testing.

The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

by gaius 8y ago

The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

rwmj 8y ago

So I work for Red Hat and the truth is no one will know until after the acquisition, but there are certainly no plans for that, nor have I heard anyone even discussing such a thing. CentOS is a valuable part of Red Hat and an important part of keeping users in the ecosystem even if they're not paying us, so it wouldn't really make any sense. IBM aren't stupid (despite nonsense that people write online), and Red Hat is a cash machine and they'd be stupid if they messed with a proven model which works.

ianai 8y ago
Seems like supporting and incorporating RHEL support into IBM’s business is the reason they bought RHEL. They effectively grew their business contracts with the addition of all the RHEL contracts. If anything, I would expect business as usual for their business customers. It was a really obvious market move in hindsight.
- merb 8y ago
  my guess is they bought redhat because it bought coreos. and ibm wanted that, too.
  - recentdarkness 8y ago
    That’s a big premium over this what? 250 million?

tapoxi 8y ago

It would do damage to the brand, and then you'd see developers fork Fedora and build their own RHEL-like "enterprise Linux".

kbenson 8y ago

IBM has never struck me as that clueless about open source, and I imagine Red Hat management would fight that as much as possible realizing how much of a long term strategic blunder it would be.

reacharavindh 8y ago

CentOS is being used by a lot of HPC shops, academia and research units like one where I administer a HPC. For the number of cores that HPC shops run, the bill would become FAT real soon if we have to pay for OS. I'd imagine that if IBM messed with CentOS, it'd be called out for being incredibly dumb about RH business, and there would emerge an open fork of RHEL that is not owned by IBM like CentOS is. To give you an idea, we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like. If IBM touches CentOS, the whole domino falls and we start looking for alternatives.

51lver 8y ago
I haven't used scientific linux since version 6, but it was a very nice centos alternative at the time.
- lima 8y ago
  Still is.

LinuxBender 8y ago

Regardless of who owns Redhat, they still have to provide the source RPM's for most of the packages. The best they could do is change the build format enough and often enough to make it painful to repackage. I don't envision them doing this however. That would force a lot of people away from Redhat based distros and guarantee barring conversion to RHEL entitlements.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

walrus01 8y ago

From the people I know using huge amounts of centos in production, they're not going to pay for RHEL, if centos becomes non viable they'll be switching to debian-stable and debian-testing.