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What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? If they're just transparently killing of the "free version of RHEL", that surely won't work in anything

by DCKing 6y ago

What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? If they're just transparently killing of the "free version of RHEL", that surely won't work in anything but name? There's an obvious need for a 1:1 RHEL clone, and due to the license of all software that RHEL builds on, there's no way IBM or Red Hat can stop people from actually building their own "new CentOS" and many companies and communities have done so in the past. All we have now is Red Hat taking the CentOS branding and running with it. And even that point I don't get - they could have done this with plain RHEL or Fedora branding too. I get why Red Hat or IBM doesn't like CentOS' existence, but I am fully expecting this won't kill "CentOS the concept". This sequence of events boggles my mind really.

centimeter 6y ago
> What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're probably banking on it taking a few years for a standard centos replacement to be established.
- kbenson 6y ago
  What I'm wondering is how open the CentOS build tooling is at this point, and to a lesser degree how open it was in the past and when it changed if it did.
kbenson 6y ago
> All we have now is Red Hat taking the CentOS branding and running with it. And even that point I don't get - they could have done this with plain RHEL or Fedora branding too. Yeah, it's all very confusing. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that CentOS has so much mind-share that RHEL wants to tap into that and funnel it back to themselves more effectively. It used to be people knew what Red Hat was and you had to tell them about CentOS, now so many people use and know CentOS I think there's probably a good chance a lot of them don't even know that it's a respin of RHEL. All of this only makes sense to me if the whole point is to leverage the popularity of CentOS into more RHEL subscriptions by providing a product that's more annoying for most people that care about a stable server (because it's backing their business) to use because it's less static. Personally, I think it doesn't matter why Red Hat bought CentOS, what matters is what they just did, and as I think that's purely self serving (and to the detriment of the public and community) and if there are apologist engineers here that work for RH, perhaps they should look closely at how management is managing them, because of course management is going to present it in a way that tries not to alienate their staff and community. The results speak for themselves though, CentOS in the form that so many people relied on is effectively dead in a year.
- DCKing 6y ago
  That's a good explanation, but I'm sad they're committed to just wasting everybody's time.
toyg 6y ago
Companies’ strategies change with time. RH took over CentOS in 2014, but then was itself bought by IBM last year. So what was the plan (and the leadership) in 2014 is not necessarily the plan (and the leadership) in 2020. Also, conditions change. RH might have decided that Centos had become a bit too successful and was cannibalizing actual RHEL sales (covid year, everyone is hurting, people try to skimp on licenses...).
stjohnswarts 6y ago
They took it over to kill it, that seems rather obvious. This definitely seems to be an IBM thing even though they said they'd basically leave Redhat alone for the most part and just enjoy pulling it into their sphere of software. So much for that.

by DCKing 6y ago

centimeter 6y ago

> What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're probably banking on it taking a few years for a standard centos replacement to be established.

kbenson 6y ago
What I'm wondering is how open the CentOS build tooling is at this point, and to a lesser degree how open it was in the past and when it changed if it did.

kbenson 6y ago

> All we have now is Red Hat taking the CentOS branding and running with it. And even that point I don't get - they could have done this with plain RHEL or Fedora branding too. Yeah, it's all very confusing. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that CentOS has so much mind-share that RHEL wants to tap into that and funnel it back to themselves more effectively. It used to be people knew what Red Hat was and you had to tell them about CentOS, now so many people use and know CentOS I think there's probably a good chance a lot of them don't even know that it's a respin of RHEL. All of this only makes sense to me if the whole point is to leverage the popularity of CentOS into more RHEL subscriptions by providing a product that's more annoying for most people that care about a stable server (because it's backing their business) to use because it's less static. Personally, I think it doesn't matter why Red Hat bought CentOS, what matters is what they just did, and as I think that's purely self serving (and to the detriment of the public and community) and if there are apologist engineers here that work for RH, perhaps they should look closely at how management is managing them, because of course management is going to present it in a way that tries not to alienate their staff and community. The results speak for themselves though, CentOS in the form that so many people relied on is effectively dead in a year.

DCKing 6y ago
That's a good explanation, but I'm sad they're committed to just wasting everybody's time.

toyg 6y ago

Companies’ strategies change with time. RH took over CentOS in 2014, but then was itself bought by IBM last year. So what was the plan (and the leadership) in 2014 is not necessarily the plan (and the leadership) in 2020. Also, conditions change. RH might have decided that Centos had become a bit too successful and was cannibalizing actual RHEL sales (covid year, everyone is hurting, people try to skimp on licenses...).

stjohnswarts 6y ago

They took it over to kill it, that seems rather obvious. This definitely seems to be an IBM thing even though they said they'd basically leave Redhat alone for the most part and just enjoy pulling it into their sphere of software. So much for that.