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Can 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 f

Can 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 ago
In 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 ago
  In 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 ago
The 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.
- pnutjam 6y ago
  The OpenSuse community has a pretty good model. They work with Suse, but set their own priorities.

mbreese 6y ago

In 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 ago
In 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 ago

The 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.

pnutjam 6y ago
The OpenSuse community has a pretty good model. They work with Suse, but set their own priorities.