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CentOS Linux is dead–and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”
- intpx 6y agoI'd recommend anybody truly curious about this check out ep383 of the Linux Unplugged podcast. Its the only serious analysis of the shift, with people in the know, that I have seen. No, its not all roses and sunshine but the 'community' response has been so universally full of FUD and dumb assumptions. RedHat bought the CentOS project and they did it in the service of RHEL. Its kind of amazing that something like this <<hasn't>> happened already over the last 6 years
- nix23 6y ago>RedHat bought the CentOS project and they did it in the service of RHEL It's funny, when a corporation buy's a community and then decides something without asking the community and even cut the support-time, who could imagine that people get angry?? Has RedHat the same marketing firm as Oracle?
- pjmlp 6y agoNah, maybe it is about time people learn to pay for their tools like in other professions.
- nix23 6y agoNice, then i wait until RedHat/IBM gives out billions of dollars from the software they sold and took for free.
- pjmlp 6y agoNext time choose a better license.
- type0 6y agoRed Hat is and was possible because of the copyleft licenses. Look up their history.
- pjmlp 6y agoSo? Get Fedora then.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoWhat does Fedora have to do with anything? It's a separate distro
- drran 6y agoRedHat is the major contributor to Linux ecosystem, so they are not using the free software for free. They pay back, as intended. For bad example, look at Apple or Amazon.
- nix23 6y agoThat was not the point, don't try to change my words.
- NineStarPoint 6y agoSounds like a great way to stifle the innovation that tech is known for. The amount of well made free options in the tech sphere is part of why we can so efficiently start new companies.
- nix23 6y agoHe probably paid 10k of dollars for his Compiler like in the 80's.
- pjmlp 6y agoI surely not only paid for my compilers (started coding in 1986), also do donations every time I download a distro, buy books from all open source projects that are relevant for my work.
- type0 6y agoNot everyone is as fortunate as you are, some cs students in poor countries might also need a stable server OS that is not Debian. You could argue they shouldn't but this is in the spirit of open source: non-discriminatory access regardless of the economic situation. Do not reduce it to donationaware argument. When you buy RHEL you are buying the support access and not anything else.
- devmor 6y agoGreat idea, then do you think the corporations using our open source software should pay us billions in back revenue as well?
- c0l0 6y agoI always found the "C" in CentOS, the "Community Enterprise OS"... awkward. I admit I haven't been following the project very closely over the years, but true community projects look different. Look at Debian, for example - internal drama and a at times gory, public decision making process. People with very different perspectives on a unfiying vision coming together to find solutions to the problems they have, and sometimes even create. It's slow, it's not as efficient as it could be - but it's a mix of democratic and meritocratic principles that is without equal, and that, I think, will stand the test of time for as long as there is such a thing as a Free Software/Open Source community to speak of. Now CentOS's practical goal - repackaging RHEL gratis - isn't really compatible with what a true community project like Debian is about, in my view. There's no real way for the project to steer away from whatever RHEL chooses to deliver, in neither a positive or negative direction. In that sense, "CentOS Streams", as a new upstream-of-sorts for RHEL, is much more "C"-enabling that what CentOS has been before - because a community (if one will emerge, or maybe it already has) can actually take action to change their own fate, and not totally depend on whatever their Enterprise Linux Overlords decide to make happen. A pity we're not really looking for this kind of thing where I work now, and most current users of CentOS probably weren't really in it for the "C", but more for the "entOS" part. They were looking for being able to rapidly roll out RHEL clone installations, without having to pay or care about any stupid and impeding commercial licensing restrictions at all. Well, the free lunch at that particular place is over, it seems. That said, I'm curious to see what will take CentOS's place in that regard.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThe whole idea of "buying a community" shows that they didn't have a clue what they were doing. Or didn't care.
- linuxftw 6y agoCentOS was supposed to be a community project supported by Red Hat. They appointed themselves to the 'governance board' and never held a single election, not even one seat, to represent the 'community.' Then, they made this decision behind closed doors, rather than at least have a public discussion period. The community response is in no way FUD. They took a project, killed it, and expect you to like whatever rolling alpha they pretend is it's replacement.
- usefulcat 6y agoRH CTO Chris Wright: "CentOS Stream isn’t a replacement for CentOS Linux; rather, it’s a natural, inevitable next step intended to fulfill the project’s goal of furthering enterprise Linux innovation."
- salamanderman 6y agoSo, the "goal" of CentOS in their minds was not the part that was valued by a large proportion of its users.
- falcolas 6y agoThe goal of CentOS, back when I used it, was to provide a bedrock-solid OS and package repository. CentOS machines would run for months or years without manual intervention. That's as far from "innovation" as you can get - and that was the point. We didn't want the bleeding edge. We wanted the spine of the blade upon which to build our bleeding edge software.
- vbezhenar 6y agoCan someone enlighten me, what does it mean that RedHat bought CentOS? Who owned CentOS, who got paid for it? I never did any research about those topics, but for me CentOS was like Debian: just community under a single tag which can't be bought or sold. I guess I was wrong.
- mbreese 6y agoIn 2012-2014, CentOS had a resources issue. It was far more popular than they had resources to support. With the then upcoming switch from RHEL6 to 7, my suspicion is that they were worried about having large delays in releasing like they had at the start of the RHEL6 release. Here is the mailing list entry for when they were acqi-hired : https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-January/020100.html https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu... Instead of seeing CentOS fold, Red Hat decided to hire the core members and support the project. They set up a governance structure for the project, which pretty much guaranteed a RH majority in all votes. AFAICT, there was no requirement for public voting, board seat terms, elections, or public input. CentOS never really had the strong (public) governance model of something like Debian. RedHat bought the project the old fashioned way — they hired the people who worked on it and stacked the board.
- readams 6y agoIn general Red Hat is good at infiltrating and taking control of open source projects even without hiring the main developers. The open source foundations are generally pretty vulnerable to this approach.
- type0 6y agoThe problem is it never had a community to speak of, RH did aquihire it and put it on life support, now only a couple of maintainers work on CentOS, this situation is in part self-inflicted. You could blame that RH always looked at CentOS as their bastard child and never treated it as good as Fedora which has a healthy community relations. I don't have high hopes for CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux is going to be the main go-to distro for rpm from now; with no corporation standing in the way I wish them all the luck but this going to be a rocky ride.
- blueblob 6y agoIf I understood correctly, CentOS Stream is a beta or a nightly for RedHat now?
- falcolas 6y agoThat's how I'm reading it. And it's the exact opposite of what I relied upon CentOS for in the past. In the past, CentOS was what I used when I needed a rock solid OS and software packages that could run for months, if not years, with few manual interventions.
- pak9rabid 6y agoYeah, I myself used CentOS when I needed a 100% binary-compatible version of RHEL for free, without all the horse shit that RHEL forces you into (RHN, etc). Oh well, I guess there's Oracle Unbreakable Linux to fill this gap until something better comes along.
- pak9rabid 6y agoAnother possibility for those that are being affected by this: in the past when I had no choice but to use RHEL but didn't have an active RHN subscription, I just removed the RHN yum repos and replaced them with CentOS equivalents and everything worked out just fine. In the event the CentOS repos get pulled, then I imagine one could do the same thing, but with Oracle's repos instead.
- op00to 6y agoAnd when your company gets audited by Oracle and they find the repos, you’ll have a nice conversation about how you need to buy a bunch of oracle cloud bullshit or else you owe a bunch for support.
- dralley 6y agoRHN is dead as a doornail, for the record. Replaced by RH Subscription Manager
- polotics 6y agoFor the uninitiated but happy Fedora user, may I ask if I will see any consequences?
- jsight 6y agoI wouldn't expect any. It seems like Fedora will still be the upstream for major RHEL releases. This is more like a rawhide for RHEL from my perspective.
- dralley 6y agoRawhide is a bad comparison to use. CentOS Stream will never get any major fundamental changes to the system like Rawhide does on a regular basis. It's technically rolling release compared to RHEL, but the window of acceptable changes is very small. It's not like Arch and Rawhide and Debian Testing where major OS components can be swapped out under your feet. The majority of the changes would fall into the categories of bugfix backports, backports of extremely useful/important features, and backports of support for new hardware.
- aritmo 6y agoOld CentOS has been damaging their bottom line, because it was a valid RHEL replacement. Is there a desktop RHEL? If there is, then Fedora may be used to test software, therefore the stability will suffer.
- cooljacob204 6y agoHas it though? How many companies have moved from centos to RHEL?
- op00to 6y agoCompanies constantly find themselves in the position to move from CentOS to RHEL.
- dralley 6y agoYes, RHEL Workstation exists. Not sure I understand your point though?
- paride5745 6y agoThe original founder of CentOS basically forked CentOS: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/
- ghostpepper 6y agoHow did they not see this coming? Or do they just not care?
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoRed hat is now owned by IBM. IBM needs to pull every cent of profit out of their acquisition. Expect them to change licensing whenever possible and to use more restrictive licensing on new features to make it impossible for anyone to completely fork Redhat Enterprise in the future.
- pt307 6y agoThe Red Hat employees on freenode's #centos and #centos-devel have been quite adamant that IBM had nothing to do with this decision. How true that is, of course, is anyone's guess.
- moonbug 6y agoThe set of people who make decisions like this has no intersection with the set of people who hang out on IRC.
- Shared404 6y agoThe github ceo contacted the youtube-dl developers through IRC... Obviously not related to this case, but seems like a pretty good indicator that the Venn Diagram has at least some overlap.
- pt307 6y agoRich Bowen (author of the initial announcement) was one of the Red Hat employees on IRC making that assertion. He has also said the same on the centos-devel mailing list: https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-December/075474.html https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-Decembe...
- SloopJon 6y agoFor those who have glossed over the recent CentOS posts, because you don't really know what Stream is, or maybe didn't realize that Red Hat effectively owns CentOS now, this article is an accessible survey. My question for the Rocky Linux team: if CentOS was struggling for resources before Red Hat's involvement in 2014, how is Rocky any better positioned to succeed?
- choeger 6y agoI am not part of that team, but there are two possible answers: Experience and Motivation. CentOS should provide some experience, best practices, etc., for guidance. CentOS Stream should provide for some motivation, if it really turna out that it cannot be used as a replacement for CentOS 8.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bediger4000 6y agoWhat will Oracle do for Oracle Enterprise Linux? What will the users of OEL do? I mean, they're all corporations, but still...
- marcosdumay 6y ago> What will Oracle do for Oracle Enterprise Linux? Push it as a free installation as widely as possible and then go after the people installing it with some reason they should pay? What should one expect Oracle to do? OEL is free and widely distributed because it's the environment where Oracle Database runs. But if it gets a life on its own, I do fully expect it will get monetized.
- pnutjam 6y agoThey've largely left the licensing for Virtual Box alone, but I also find it difficult to trust Oracle.
- marcosdumay 6y agoVirtual Box is open core, and the free version is slowly losing features. Ok, they didn't go threatening to sue everybody that ever installed it. That's exceeding my expectations already, but it's not a neutral stance.
- selfhoster11 6y agoCan you point to some of the free features they've taken back? I have been using VirtualBox nearly every day at work for the past 4 years, and my experience is that if anything, it's improved in quality and free features since the Oracle acquisition. I do realise how toxic it is to have the proprietary extension pack as the source of advanced features, but the only thing that's I really, really need from that is USB 2.0. It's not like new features are even extension pack exclusives either, most of them land in the open core from the start.
- 6y ago
- prpl 6y agoAssuming Centos stream is still having point releases, how different is tracking the previous point release of repos from using centos currently? e.g. if this is what the tick-tock looks like: day 1: Centos stream 8.3 is being updated and maintained day 2: RHEL 8.3 is released based on stream 8.3. day 3: Centos Stream is now 8.4 After day 3 can you still just track 8.3? Is the issue that centos package repos won’t get updates (particularly security updates) at that point, while RHEL does?
- zozbot234 6y ago> After day 3 can you still just track 8.3? Is the issue that centos package repos won’t get updates (particularly security updates) at that point, while RHEL does? CentOS has never released backported updates to previous minor releases. You've always had to stay on the latest minor release, so it's not like there's any real change here.
- prpl 6y agoRight, but the difference today is that Centos is always behind RHEL updates though, yeah? In the future, Centos Stream is always ahead of RHEL point releases, and on day 2 they are close to equivalent, and on day 3/4, centos is goes back to being ahead (at 8.4 and getting security updates), where rhel is at 8.3 and getting security updates. Assuming that, on the day of a RHEL point release, the two distros are roughly equivalent in packages, with the caveat that the Centos package repos at that point move to the next release (8.4), so you don't get any updates ( presumably mostly security related) in the 8.3 repos... at that point - with those assumptions, if you were on the previous Centos (8.2) - would waiting for the RHEL release to upgrade to the next, now unsupported Centos point release (8.3) be close to roughly equivalent with what the situation is today in terms of compatibility/stability? (I'm not sure what the answer there is) Or - could just track behind a minor release to approximate the situation today with the caveat that you're not going to get all the updates? Does Rocky linux end up just being the previous centos stream version with updates to the package repos?
- sascha_sl 6y ago
- mmmrk 6y agoI don't use CentOS, but the negativity around this both surprises and does not surprise me. CentOS seemed like a way to get RHEL for free, lots of people jumped on that and suddenly, when it's no longer free, they throw a tantrum (my favorite: "they betrayed the community"). This strikes me as both ridiculous and just the way FOSS works.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoNo, it's how a bad way of forcing a monetisation model onto FOSS works. Breaking promises (cutting 80% of the support term of CentOS 8) is not how FOSS became successful.
- mmmrk 6y agoI cannot comment on the soundness of the decision, but what was the deal with the community here? I can for example see that Debian is community driven with all the advantages and drawbacks that come with this, but was CentOS ever more than a relabeling of RHEL RPMs in the hopes that people would pay for RHEL eventually? I just don't see why anyone can demand anything (not even promises) from RH here.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoCentOS was definitely not started in the hope people would pay for RHEL. It was started as a real community project, taken over mid-run by RedHat.
- op00to 6y agoAsk for your money back.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI don't even use CentOS :P I never liked RedHat from the start, even back in the 90s.
- holri 6y agoCommunities are more stable than companies.
- dane-pgp 6y agoThat reminds me of another great aphorism: "Linux is a process, not a product." -- Ian Murdock
- callesgg 6y agoWhy would anyone who has a good understanding of the current software paradigms chose to develop their software for redhat.. I understand that companies like SAP might use redhat. Mostly A political decision made by people who has a say in spendings of to much money. Cent OS seamed like a bad idea from the start. It does not fill the political reason that allows for redhat. And it does not fill the checkboxes for what a modern independent developer would want. Maybe I am naive but I can’t see any reason for 1 not caring about the OS and some type of container or “server less” service or just using Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the Granny Smith of apples most things I see is built for Ubuntu and it just works.
- gizmo686 6y ago1) Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. (This quote was relevant here even before IBM literally acquired Redhat). 2) Redhat offers support; and that support is a potentially valuable service worth the cost. If you want that support, you need to use RHEL. 3) If you are developing for a regulated industry, RHEL may be a pre-certified base you can use. This can substantially reduce the cost and risk with certifying your entire system compared with trying to use a not-yet certified base. As someone who develops for RHEL because of (3), CentOS filled the niche of 'development environment for RHEL without needing to worry about licencing issues'. It also served as a way out of vendor lock in if you wanted to stop paying for RHEL without needing to migrate your system.
- dralley 6y agoNot every company deals in web apps and streaming videos. Some companies run the NY Stock Exchange, national and international telecommunications, and managing extremely sensitive information. These companies need to care about the OS.
- skinner927 6y agoRHEL has accreditations baked in (or easy enough to flip a switch) that some industries, such as payment processing and government, require. These accreditations can be had on other systems to some degree but RHEL is the defacto in these realms.
- charliebrownau 6y agoIs it finally time to drop support and usage for Corportion driven software/platforms Corporations need us , more then we need them Do we need to support - systemd - gnome - wayland - pulse - copyright drivers in the kernal ?
- cozzyd 6y agoI've been watching these closely for any updates: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENT... https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-DEVEL https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENT... Plenty of chatter in https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind2012&L=SCIENT...
- adultSwim 6y agoI guess they want to get paid for their work. RHEL is still alive.