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I'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 kn
by intpx 6y ago
I'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.