8 ms·

The original founder of CentOS basically forked CentOS: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/

by paride5745 6y ago

ghostpepper 6y ago
How did they not see this coming? Or do they just not care?
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Red 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      The set of people who make decisions like this has no intersection with the set of people who hang out on IRC.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        The 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 ago
        Rich 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...
    - pseudosavant 6y ago
      What is worse really? 1. IBM being IBM and forcing RedHat to milk RHEL for all it is worth ecosystem be damned 2. RedHat deciding to do this all on their own without even requiring any pressure from IBM - because they are just as bad as IBM now IMO #2.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Red Hat have, contrary to the slashdot-circa-2000 meming, historically been an exemplar of open source values. They've released products that they purchased (such as RHEV) under free licenses, they do upstream delivery of their work, and they pay for a substantial chunk of the ongoing development of many key free software projects. It was not unreasonable to assume that they would maintain CentOS. This change has occurred now that Red Hat are IBM. I expect to see more, bad, changes. Cutting devs from free software contribution that aren't "directly important" enough, killing free software stacks like JBoss that compete with IBM offerings, and so on.
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    I saw some redhat people at a Linux conf and they scared me. Like they were all giddy on some cult koolaid. And they were actually strutting around wearing red hats. I maintained a healthy distance. I suspect IBM will be a perfect fit.
    - neilv 6y ago
      Alan Cox was sometimes seen with a red hat, and he's about as far from traditional blue tie as one could get. :) Enthusiasm, and a bit of counterculture in the mix, seems like a good sign for the long-term health of the organization, IMHO. BTW, Linux conferences at least used to be very social events, for developers who'd only been interacting online in text, to get together. Maybe people were just really happy to be there.
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      They always wear the hats at trade shows, it's just their promotional thing... It gives them easy recognisability, after all trade shows are all about marketing. They give them away too (but not the same quality as the ones they wear). That giddy thing is also a tradeshow thing, some companies really pump their employees that work at these things, but they're not normally like that :) Only if you know someone well enough you can get real info. The real communication at these tradeshows is not done in the booths but in back rooms and coffee corners. The front booths are just marketing with some low level PR staff.
EvanAnderson 6y ago
Prior to the RedHat "acquisition" how was CentOS getting RHEL source? How would the "Rocky Linux" CentOS fork go about doing the same thing? I've heard time and again that RedHat will terminate a subscriber's contract if the subscriber is caught distributing RHEL source or binaries to discourage further distribution. Detecting such redistribution seems difficult to me, but setting that aside and assuming it's true, how does a project like CentOS or Rocky Linux get RHEL sources in a sustainable manner?
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  Red Hat ships source publicly, but not binaries. http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/8Base/en/RHOS/SRPMS/ http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/8Base/en/RHOS/...
  - mastre_ 6y ago
    Is there anything to stop RH from not continuing to make these publicly available, since their intent is to stop the exact itch CentOS scratched?
    - rnd0 6y ago
      There's nothing to stop them, no. But that wouldn't change that they have to make the sources available to their customers -and it takes one customer to get the source and provide it for a fork.
      - EvanAnderson 6y ago
        But if getting caught making further distribution of RHEL causes a Customer to lose their support contract then the Customers would be unlikely to do so.
        benlivengood 6y ago
        One could hypothetically buy an unwanted cheap support contract to get access to the source.
bluedino 6y ago
Not so much a fork but just a re-packaging of RHEL.
bollockitis 6y ago
My relatively conservative organization would never choose a new Linux distribution to replace CentOS, especially not one with a cheeky name. CentOS has a long track record and is well-trusted. I wish the developers all the best but if CentOS is gone, I suspect we’ll be discussing migrating to Oracle Linux (egh) or even Ubuntu. Rocky Linux will not even be discussed as an alternative.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  That seems like a surprisingly capricious reason to make a decision that's going to have medium sized real-world impact in terms of rebuilding around a new distros way of doing things.
  - bollockitis 6y ago
    I am not saying I agree with it, just pointing out that some organizations consider long-term viability as a key component to these kinds of decisions. Just because a fork exists doesn’t qualify it to be a drop-in substitute.

The original founder of CentOS basically forked CentOS: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/

ghostpepper 6y ago

How did they not see this coming? Or do they just not care?

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Red 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    The set of people who make decisions like this has no intersection with the set of people who hang out on IRC.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      The 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 ago
      Rich 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...
  - pseudosavant 6y ago
    What is worse really? 1. IBM being IBM and forcing RedHat to milk RHEL for all it is worth ecosystem be damned 2. RedHat deciding to do this all on their own without even requiring any pressure from IBM - because they are just as bad as IBM now IMO #2.
rodgerd 6y ago
Red Hat have, contrary to the slashdot-circa-2000 meming, historically been an exemplar of open source values. They've released products that they purchased (such as RHEV) under free licenses, they do upstream delivery of their work, and they pay for a substantial chunk of the ongoing development of many key free software projects. It was not unreasonable to assume that they would maintain CentOS. This change has occurred now that Red Hat are IBM. I expect to see more, bad, changes. Cutting devs from free software contribution that aren't "directly important" enough, killing free software stacks like JBoss that compete with IBM offerings, and so on.
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  I saw some redhat people at a Linux conf and they scared me. Like they were all giddy on some cult koolaid. And they were actually strutting around wearing red hats. I maintained a healthy distance. I suspect IBM will be a perfect fit.
  - neilv 6y ago
    Alan Cox was sometimes seen with a red hat, and he's about as far from traditional blue tie as one could get. :) Enthusiasm, and a bit of counterculture in the mix, seems like a good sign for the long-term health of the organization, IMHO. BTW, Linux conferences at least used to be very social events, for developers who'd only been interacting online in text, to get together. Maybe people were just really happy to be there.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    They always wear the hats at trade shows, it's just their promotional thing... It gives them easy recognisability, after all trade shows are all about marketing. They give them away too (but not the same quality as the ones they wear). That giddy thing is also a tradeshow thing, some companies really pump their employees that work at these things, but they're not normally like that :) Only if you know someone well enough you can get real info. The real communication at these tradeshows is not done in the booths but in back rooms and coffee corners. The front booths are just marketing with some low level PR staff.

EvanAnderson 6y ago

Prior to the RedHat "acquisition" how was CentOS getting RHEL source? How would the "Rocky Linux" CentOS fork go about doing the same thing? I've heard time and again that RedHat will terminate a subscriber's contract if the subscriber is caught distributing RHEL source or binaries to discourage further distribution. Detecting such redistribution seems difficult to me, but setting that aside and assuming it's true, how does a project like CentOS or Rocky Linux get RHEL sources in a sustainable manner?

Jasper_ 6y ago
Red Hat ships source publicly, but not binaries. http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/8Base/en/RHOS/SRPMS/ http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/8Base/en/RHOS/...
- mastre_ 6y ago
  Is there anything to stop RH from not continuing to make these publicly available, since their intent is to stop the exact itch CentOS scratched?
  - rnd0 6y ago
    There's nothing to stop them, no. But that wouldn't change that they have to make the sources available to their customers -and it takes one customer to get the source and provide it for a fork.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      But if getting caught making further distribution of RHEL causes a Customer to lose their support contract then the Customers would be unlikely to do so.
      - benlivengood 6y ago
        One could hypothetically buy an unwanted cheap support contract to get access to the source.

bluedino 6y ago

Not so much a fork but just a re-packaging of RHEL.

bollockitis 6y ago

My relatively conservative organization would never choose a new Linux distribution to replace CentOS, especially not one with a cheeky name. CentOS has a long track record and is well-trusted. I wish the developers all the best but if CentOS is gone, I suspect we’ll be discussing migrating to Oracle Linux (egh) or even Ubuntu. Rocky Linux will not even be discussed as an alternative.

Godel_unicode 6y ago
That seems like a surprisingly capricious reason to make a decision that's going to have medium sized real-world impact in terms of rebuilding around a new distros way of doing things.
- bollockitis 6y ago
  I am not saying I agree with it, just pointing out that some organizations consider long-term viability as a key component to these kinds of decisions. Just because a fork exists doesn’t qualify it to be a drop-in substitute.