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> edit: after a little thought it seems that moving to RHEL might cost us the least amount of money and downtime. Still sucks and not what we need to be working

> edit: after a little thought it seems that moving to RHEL might cost us the least amount of money and downtime. Still sucks and not what we need to be working on right now. And that is exactly what IBM is counting on. Vendor lock in. We are switching to Debian-based distros because, frankly, we don't trust IBM not to knife us in the back even on RHEL for more money. Of course we have the advantage of being able to take the time to convert.

bonzini 6y ago
This is not about IBM. It may not be a pleasant change for everyone, but it's a change that has strictly technical motives. CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat's upstream for layered products (at the time mostly RDO/OpenStack and oVirt/RHEV) could not use Fedora because it was too far from RHEL a year of two after RHEL was released, could not use RHEL because upstream contributors would have to pay, and could not use CentOS because its releases had too large delays. The solution was to make CentOS releases happen timely by paying people to make them. These days a RHEL downstream is not enough for the layered products. Some of them require the kind of bleeding edge feature that is backported every six months to the RHEL kernel, and corresponding userspace changes (BPF, virtualization, etc.) and cannot afford waiting for the CentOS release because development must be done in parallel with RHEL. So the solution was to move CentOS from happening after RHEL to before RHEL which is what CentOS Stream is. I can confidently say that the reasons are technical because other CentOS downstream have the same needs (e.g. Facebook's) and they also want to send patches to CentOS for bugfixes or features themselves, instead of waiting for Red Hat to find out about that bug, or decide they need the same feature. Plus there's no reason for rebuilds to disappear. The SRPMs will still be released by Red Hat.
- kbenson 6y ago
  That in no way explains why they don't continue to have both. They indeed will have both for another year. There was no requirement the Stream product even use the CentOS name. CentOS was a community project whose leadership and control was taken over (acqui-hired as you say) by Red Hat and then it's core use case for the majority of people actually using it was discontinued. That is a statement of facts that happened as I understand them, not some spin on my part. If Red Hat had not stepped in, perhaps some of CentOS problems (trouble getting releases out on time) would have been worse, or perhaps some other companies would have stepped in. We don't know, but we do know that CentOS has not been changed to be something different than it was before. It used to be a free re-spin of RHEL. Going forward it's something entirely different. Red Hat always had the option to stop funding/providing resources to CentOS and name their new thing something else, but they didn't, and now they've effectively co-opted CentOS to be something different than it was originally intended to be.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    > That in no way explains why they don't continue to have both Because they don't need it anymore. CentOS Linux or other rebuilds can still exist (just not using the name; I disagree with that but I can understand Red Hat doesn't want its name attached to something that might have large delays in security fixes in the future) if somebody funds it or volunteers to do it, just like CentOS still supports Xen but RHEL does not. Also for what is worth there have been lots of engineering changes to RHEL in the past couple of years that make nightlies (and CentOS Stream) much more stable than they used to be, especially with respect to regressions. Running CentOS Stream is not going to be like Fedora Rawhide or Debian sid.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      >>> it's a change that has strictly technical motives. I understand the business reasons for doing so. I don't agree with anyone branding this as done for purely technical reasons. Having CentOS Stream may be needed for technical reasons. Stopping CentOS 8 is in no way a technical decision. They are unrelated in any technical sense. If Red Hat just doesn't want to put resources towards CentOS as it traditionally existed anymore, that's their option, but they deserve any flak they get for taking over an open source project just to extinguish it, since CentOS is in no way really needs to be linked to their Stream product. They could just as easily called it RHEL Stream and said it's free, and it would be a less confusing and more direct funnel of people that want RHEL stability into RHEL subscriptions. Using the CentOS name is just a mind-share grab and screwing over an open source community. They control it so can do it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to call them out for doing so.
      - bonzini 6y ago
        The thing is, Red Hat never considered the distro more than a side effect of providing a base for developing "things" that will run on RHEL. It's even written on the centos.org home page, the distro is not why CentOS existed in 2020. So the fact that users (including myself!!) enjoyed a free distro as a result was not a part of Red Hat's RHEL strategy in any way.

bonzini 6y ago

This is not about IBM. It may not be a pleasant change for everyone, but it's a change that has strictly technical motives. CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat's upstream for layered products (at the time mostly RDO/OpenStack and oVirt/RHEV) could not use Fedora because it was too far from RHEL a year of two after RHEL was released, could not use RHEL because upstream contributors would have to pay, and could not use CentOS because its releases had too large delays. The solution was to make CentOS releases happen timely by paying people to make them. These days a RHEL downstream is not enough for the layered products. Some of them require the kind of bleeding edge feature that is backported every six months to the RHEL kernel, and corresponding userspace changes (BPF, virtualization, etc.) and cannot afford waiting for the CentOS release because development must be done in parallel with RHEL. So the solution was to move CentOS from happening after RHEL to before RHEL which is what CentOS Stream is. I can confidently say that the reasons are technical because other CentOS downstream have the same needs (e.g. Facebook's) and they also want to send patches to CentOS for bugfixes or features themselves, instead of waiting for Red Hat to find out about that bug, or decide they need the same feature. Plus there's no reason for rebuilds to disappear. The SRPMs will still be released by Red Hat.

kbenson 6y ago
That in no way explains why they don't continue to have both. They indeed will have both for another year. There was no requirement the Stream product even use the CentOS name. CentOS was a community project whose leadership and control was taken over (acqui-hired as you say) by Red Hat and then it's core use case for the majority of people actually using it was discontinued. That is a statement of facts that happened as I understand them, not some spin on my part. If Red Hat had not stepped in, perhaps some of CentOS problems (trouble getting releases out on time) would have been worse, or perhaps some other companies would have stepped in. We don't know, but we do know that CentOS has not been changed to be something different than it was before. It used to be a free re-spin of RHEL. Going forward it's something entirely different. Red Hat always had the option to stop funding/providing resources to CentOS and name their new thing something else, but they didn't, and now they've effectively co-opted CentOS to be something different than it was originally intended to be.
- bonzini 6y ago
  > That in no way explains why they don't continue to have both Because they don't need it anymore. CentOS Linux or other rebuilds can still exist (just not using the name; I disagree with that but I can understand Red Hat doesn't want its name attached to something that might have large delays in security fixes in the future) if somebody funds it or volunteers to do it, just like CentOS still supports Xen but RHEL does not. Also for what is worth there have been lots of engineering changes to RHEL in the past couple of years that make nightlies (and CentOS Stream) much more stable than they used to be, especially with respect to regressions. Running CentOS Stream is not going to be like Fedora Rawhide or Debian sid.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    >>> it's a change that has strictly technical motives. I understand the business reasons for doing so. I don't agree with anyone branding this as done for purely technical reasons. Having CentOS Stream may be needed for technical reasons. Stopping CentOS 8 is in no way a technical decision. They are unrelated in any technical sense. If Red Hat just doesn't want to put resources towards CentOS as it traditionally existed anymore, that's their option, but they deserve any flak they get for taking over an open source project just to extinguish it, since CentOS is in no way really needs to be linked to their Stream product. They could just as easily called it RHEL Stream and said it's free, and it would be a less confusing and more direct funnel of people that want RHEL stability into RHEL subscriptions. Using the CentOS name is just a mind-share grab and screwing over an open source community. They control it so can do it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to call them out for doing so.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      The thing is, Red Hat never considered the distro more than a side effect of providing a base for developing "things" that will run on RHEL. It's even written on the centos.org home page, the distro is not why CentOS existed in 2020. So the fact that users (including myself!!) enjoyed a free distro as a result was not a part of Red Hat's RHEL strategy in any way.