16 ms·

Red Hat Goes Full IBM and Says Farewell to CentOS

222 points by vanburen 6y ago

meddlepal 6y ago
Article kind of hints at it but I suspect RHEL is going to get a new licensing model to capture the CentOS crowd under the RHEL umbrella. Once that's done it will be easier to upsell support contracts since they'll have the users in their license DB.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I’m honestly surprised they don’t just make RHEL free and take the CentOS market for themselves. Gate the current RHEL specific features behind support contracts and call it a day. Why make your customers have to migrate to pay you?
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    This is what Oracle Linux already does, so Red Hat is only hurting themselves by not doing so, since anyone who wants this can just go to Oracle. (Notwithstanding the fact that Oracle is evil.)
    - pixl97 6y ago
      Yea, going to Oracle is always a bad idea and they'll find a way to get money out of you. It's pretty common for me to convert customers from Oracle JRE/JDK to OpenJDK/JDE when Oracle says they need to pay millions for no good reason.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        Look I just did an Oracle to OpenJDK transition for the same reason but I don't really think Java SE licensing is an example of Oracle being particularly Oracle. It's just that Oracle Java isn't free and they're doing what every company is doing switching from one-time license fees to subscriptions.
      - josephcsible 6y ago
        But here's the kicker: the worst thing Oracle can possibly do is to say "yeah, that whole Linux distro that we used to give you for free? We're not doing that anymore." So even if you do move to Oracle Linux and they go full evil, you're no worse off than you are on CentOS right now.
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Disagree: RH isn't likely to sue you.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    There are no RHEL specific features.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Au contraire, there are and they're quite valuable their enterprise customers. The most important is the detailed security errata published along side their RPM packages which are necessary to do things like "only install security updates" or "check if any packages have upatched vulns." RHEL but not CentOS also come with security/regulatory profiles like STIG which are necessary to run in certain environments like the DoD. Red Hat also has a license to distribute Oracle Java that CentOS lacks and so it's not available in their repos. They also ship with the Cisco network drivers that CentOS again doesn't have a license to distribute.
      - cesarb 6y ago
        There's also the extended support for minor releases. With RHEL, it's possible to stay in a minor release for longer while in CentOS you always have to migrate to the next minor release. For instance, according to the graphic at the middle of https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata with Extended Update Support one can stay at RHEL 8.2 until the middle of 2022 (so RHEL 8.2 has a full 2 years of support), while with CentOS, you had to migrate to CentOS 8.3 this month if you want to keep receiving updates (so CentOS 8.2 had only 6 months of support before being replaced with CentOS 8.3).
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yeah I really wonder if this is coming. It's wishful thinking on my end so maybe isn't reasonable, but man it'd be neat. I get annoyed when people point out "you can already get a dev license for free." Sure, but there are hoops to jump through and you can't run it "in production" (which I think is mostly a meaningless claim, but still not something I like). Nevertheless I'm optimistic and hope they announce it sooner rather than later. Hopefully the current blowback will move things along ;-)
- acomjean 6y ago
  It doesn’t surprise me. CentOS usage is huge. If they can turn 20% into paying customers it would be a huge revenue win for IBM. One hopes this newfound revenue goes toward making Linux better, but we will see. Red hat employees work on a lot of core things.
- syshum 6y ago
  If this is their plan they have screwed up pretty bad and shows a clear mis understanding of enterprise customers We like stability, if they were going to change RHEL licensing to capture CentOS enterprise customers they should have announced those changes ahead or in tandem with the CentOS Announcement The CentOS Announcment as is read was "Hello Enterprise Users of CentOS, we know we promised to support CentOS 8 until 2029, April Fools, now we are going to cut support at the end of 2021, and maybe we will have some options for you early 2021 so call us" This uncertainty and betrayal of trust is going to be hard to come back from
  - ikiris 6y ago
    Yep exactly. This is outright refusal to use anything they produce going forward, as they've shown that long term commitments mean absolutely nothing.
- ikiris 6y ago
  Doesn't matter, they poisoned the well with this.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
So, what I don’t understand is that I thought the whole point of CentOS was that RedHat didn’t control it? I guess I missed the acquisition announcement, but a RedHat-owned CentOS makes a lot less sense to me.
- pushrax 6y ago
  The whole point was that it was free. I’m not aware of anyone choosing CentOS over RHEL because of the governance structure. The feature set of CentOS directly depended on decisions by Red Hat anyway.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I would be suspicious of running essential business operations on a free version of a product the company also sells licenses for: I’d always be wondering if they’re going to change strategy on me.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Beggars can't be choosers and I don't know of another free distro providing 10 years of updates.
- bombcar 6y ago
  CentOS was dying and RedHat was a no-brainer to take over maintenance. Dying as in lacking resources and developers - not users. They err really starting to lag upstream.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  The point as I saw it was that CentOS didn't require a licensing fee. RedHat decided to make them into an official free version whose users they could then upsell onto licenses. IBM seems to have decided that they'd make more money in this segment by squeezing licenses out of existing users and killing the product.
  - 6y ago
chasil 6y ago
Many years ago, I fondly used and documented the free and open Red Hat distribution, which ended with release 9 in 2003. I still have a hard drive with the original Red Hat 6 based on System V init, not the later v6 based on Upstart. There was a great feeling of abandonment then that is nostalgic in the death of CentOS now. In the years that have passed, I saw a few licenses purchased in my workplace, then support suddenly stopped by corporate sources who instructed all license holders to convert our installs to Oracle Linux support. I remembered my feeling of abandonment by Red Hat, ran the script without complaint, and all was well. In later years, focus returned to Red Hat licensing, and I was strongly encouraged to reinstall my Oracle Linux systems (which had grown greatly, as they were free). I resisted vehemently, objecting to an inferior kernel (compared to the UEK), reduced hardware support, and the pointless inconvenience of license keys, activation, and renewals for a product of generally lower quality. Fortunately, I have avoided this inconvenience. In light of the decades of Red Hat's behavior, I will say one thing: you reap what you sow.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > In light of the decades of Red Hat's behavior, I will say one thing: you reap what you sow. I'm surprised to hear you say that, because this is exactly why I personally won't touch anything from Oracle with a ten-foot pole; I'm not fond of RH yanking support, but we're talking about the company that is known throughout the industry for license audits and calls from legal as a sales strategy. Is there some reason why you trust this particular product more?
qz2 6y ago
IBM sure knows how to piss off its potential customers.
- josho 6y ago
  The intersection of centos users and IBM customers is likely quite small. Even the tech teams inside large organizations aren’t IBM’s customer.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    While CentOS users might not represent that many IBM/RH customers, I suspect CentOS's availability has contributed to RHEL being so widely supported. If fewer people, even people who will never pay, use CentOS, then (potentially) fewer people will explicitly target RHEL/RPMs, and there's a weaker case for enterprises adoption RHEL over its competitors. CentOS led to people learning "how to use RHEL". While RH is going to try to bring developers and other non-commercial uses into free licenses, I'm not sure this will be enough.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      We already did that with Fedora before CentOS existed.
kim0 6y ago
Sure enough, the community started https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ as quick as redhat killed it!
- qz2 6y ago
  Next step they’ll stop publishing the RPM spec files or change the license on them. Edit: why the downvotes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bonzini 6y ago
    They (we, I work at Red Hat) would have no engineering department the second after.
    - qz2 6y ago
      Yes but to be clear the folk that may make that decision may not be aware of that. I’ve been in that situation before myself.
      - bonzini 6y ago
        They do (I know them, and I have talked to them since Wednesday). That's not to say this was not a screwup, but I would say that rumors around the death of free RHEL rebuilds have been greatly exaggerated.
        qz2 6y ago
        After a PR fuck up this large I am disinclined to agree.
        bonzini 6y ago
        I would be too, but I know the people.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Goddammit! I was planning a whole CentOS-based encrypted web service. SHIT! At least we haven't bought any hardware yet... back to the drawing board.
- ldng 6y ago
  Look up Springdale. It is essentially the same concept.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation.
- sitzkrieg 6y ago
  if only there is some other linux based software out there!
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Why are you tied to CentOS?
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    There's no particular reason. The OS layer is just another variable which needs to be accounted for in the planning stage, so pulling the rug out like this is a nuisance.
jsperson 6y ago
The most frustrating part of Linux for me is all the damn mental CPU cycle I have to spend keeping up with the naming and positioning of the various distros. Often it borders on drama. The other day I commented that I took my Pinebook Pro off the toy shelf and loaded up Manjaro. I commented on HN about how much I liked the user experience. The first reply I got was something about the drama with some dude named Phil. Alternatively I’ll put my head down for a while and forget about the lineage of the various options and then something will crop up about this or that distro is going away, being repositioned or whatnot. Why does this matter? Because I want to use it for real work and I don’t want to spend time planning a long term OS strategy. There are other things to worry about. I’m far from alone in this. That’s why folks reach for Mac OS and Windows. Downvote away, but I really do want to love Linux. I just don’t want it to be so hard to love.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  yeah for people just wanting to do work and not have the os be the hobby it is trying at times.
- tobinfricke 6y ago
  Just use Ubuntu
  - nullsense 6y ago
    Then what about the snap drama?
    - monsieurgaufre 6y ago
      My snap folder only has chromium in it. Like probably most users who don't (and shouldn't) care about snaps. The snap drama is a ideological purity contest by people who should know better (aka use something else than Ubuntu if that pisses them off that much).
    - mceachen 6y ago
      Don't use snap.
cutler 6y ago
I hope I don't end-up having to switch my servers to Ubuntu. yum/dnf is just so much easier than apt-get.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  Question from someone who doesn't use Linux much: Are package managers distro-specific, then?
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > Are package managers distro-specific, then? Technically no, effectively yes. You can install and use different package managers on different distros, but with the exception of things like cargo it's highly recommended to not, as you are likely going to break your system.
  - inimino 6y ago
    Yes. Package management is most of what a distro does.
  - doublepg23 6y ago
    Package managers are one of the main things that define a distro. The big split is between packaging formats (DEB and RPM [0]) and then there are package managers for that for that (apt* for DEBs and yum, dnf, zypper etc. for RPMs [1]). You could run a foreign package manager on any distro, there even exist ones for that purpose [2], but it's ostensibly considered a defining feature for a distro. [0] There are more of course, but those are the big two. [1] I'm really only familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu space (Deb) [2] See flatpak, snap, and nix/guix. Also some distros like Bedrock Linux let you have completely foreign environments mixing together.
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    Kind of. When you hear people say they use a "Debian based" distro they'll be using apt as their package manager. You have 3 main "base" distros/package mamagers: Debian/apt RHEL/yum/dnf Arch/pacman/pkgbuild There are of course many more but these are the overwhelming majority. This means if I wanted to make my own distro I could do as little as take Debian stable as my upstream, rebuild a few packages with a s/Debian/MyDisro/g and change a few default packages and call it that. Or I could track a mix of packages from Debian testing and stable. Or I could decide I prefer to build everything my self but still use apt for my package manager. This is of course turtles all the way down eg: Mint is based of Ubuntu which is based of Debian.
fanatic2pope 6y ago
The IBM bean counters have spoken and Red Hat is to be squeezed of every last drop of revenue. I bet they are demanding Red Hat employees apply for patents for everything they are working on too.
jlgaddis 6y ago
I don't think it's fair to attribute this to IBM. An outcome like this was expected as far back as 2014 -- it just took longer than most of us expected. As I've said before, CentOS hasn't been a "community" enterprise operating system for a long, long time now.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
That was to be expected for a long time. Embrace (financing most of Linux development, with SuSE historically a close 2nd), Extend (introduce Linuxisms such as systemd, containers), Extinguish (make putting together all the F/OSS amounting to a complete O/S an art, make changes for the sake of it, sell "support"). What's not answered is why now, in the middle of an active CentOS release cycle? Smells like IBM/RH doesn't see growth in new enterprise customers/startups coming to Linux (going to clouds/k8s instead and focusing on creating Docker images for workloads). RedHat surely must've been fully aware that discontinuing CentOS would create a giant backlash. I guess, like me, few people haven't used CentOS as base for new builds anyway; OTOH corporate clouds (OpenShift, k8s) for big customers seems like an attractive market for IBM/RH. Edit: a good outcome of this catastrophe might be to shift focus towards POSIX, LSB, and other means for portability which historically had strong following in the Linux and BSD communities
- senko 6y ago
  Financing development of Linux is a bad thing? Introducing Linuxisms in ... Linux? And the only thing they're extinguishing is a free (as in beer) distro that they controlled anyway (and choose not to continue putting resources into).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Financing development of Linux is a bad thing? When they do it by screwing over their users, yes. > Introducing Linuxisms in ... Linux? Introducing non-portable ways of doing things that were previously portable to non-Linux OSs, yes. It's certainly a minor point since if anything some of those changes increased portability within the Linux ecosystem, but I can sorta see "introducing Linuxisms in areas that previously weren't Linux-specific" (ex. `service foo start` did the same thing on RHEL and FreeBSD; `systemctl start foo` isn't going to be a thing on any BSD).
    - senko 6y ago
      > When they do it by screwing over their users, yes. I agree that screwing over your users is a bad thing, but I do think RH contribute a lot of time, money and effort in a way that benefits a larger Linux user base. Just by looking at Linux kernel contributions, RH are one of the largest companies contributing developer time. > Introducing non-portable ways of doing things that were previously portable to non-Linux OSs. I think SysVinit was going to be replaced sooner than later. There's a lot to be desired in a way that some systemd developers evangelized it, but the other major alternative (upstart) was also a Linuxism. Even BSD systems are moving (or considering moving) away from it. From all the "standard" Unixisims, I think that's one of the parts that's aged the worst, and it was a matter of time before various operating systems (BSDs, Linux distros,...) replaced it.
aftbit 6y ago
What did CentOS offer that Debian did not? In other words, if you're not paying for RHEL support, why would you want to use RHEL?
- justahuman74 6y ago
  Some expensive software will demand you use particular distros for them to support you Example: https://www.synopsys.com/support/licensing-installation-computeplatforms/compute-platforms/compute-platforms-roadmap.html https://www.synopsys.com/support/licensing-installation-comp...
- kdump_8 6y ago
  There is a lot of software that only officially runs on RHEL-likes. E.g. Oracle Database only supports on RHEL-likes and SLES.
- bluedino 6y ago
  Vendor support. We have a couple software packages that we run that require CentOS/RHEL.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
  CentOS releases were supported for much longer (10 years vs 3+2 years)
- joecot 6y ago
  Let's say you run RHEL on your production servers. You pay for licensing those servers, which gives you Red Hat support, and also because you have proprietary software which is only supported on Red Hat. You pay a pretty penny for those production servers. But you also need development servers, and staging servers. For those servers, RHEL would be a gigantic waste of money. It's the production servers you need enterprise support for, none of the rest. CentOS was a downstream release of Red Hat, with the same packages from Red Hat compiled. It was, for the most part, identical to Red Hat without the support. This meant you could develop on CentOS Dev Servers and test deployment on CentOS Staging servers, and expect it to work exactly the same when you sent it to production. Lots of less licensing costs, same results. Now, CentOS Stream will be upstream of Red Hat. Instead of getting the same packages as Red Hat, now you're getting the testing packages of Red Hat. You can no longer expect to get the same results from CentOS stream as from RHEL. The end of life for updates for existing CentOS releases has also been moved up drastically. By all appearances, Red Hat and IBM are essentially forcing companies to license and use RHEL on their dev and staging servers, by making CentOS Stream unusable for it. Lucky for many, Canonical went and got Ubuntu certified for many of the same proprietary hardware and software systems that were previously only supported for proprietary linux distros. This means your dev, staging, and production can all be the exact same distro, and the only difference is which servers you're paying for Canonical support for. This is a recentish change though, so many companies locked into Red Hat / CentOS because of the clear path that was established between Development and Production. And certainly not every proprietary software/hardware is supported on Ubuntu, yet. Lots of companies won't switch (the structure of Red Hat to Debian is pretty drastically different), and IBM is counting on that.
freedomben 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but I'm here entirely with my own opinion My God, it's been a long time (if ever) since I've seen so much misinformation out there. I mostly blame Red Hat for the very poor delivery, but tech people are not immune to the tendency for dramatizing, misrepresenting, and polarizing. Please stop spreading this. CentOS is NOT dead. CentOS is changing, but not all that much (yes, really). I'll do my best to answer questions here, but I'm also going to rush a blog post to try and get it out ASAP that corrects a lot of this. Edit: Here's the blog post. Excuse typos and other things, I rushed this ;-) https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
- syshum 6y ago
  Sorry but yes CentOS is dead CentOS, is COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE OPERATING SYSTEM The community is dead, the Enterprise part of the Operating system is dead Sure the CentOS name will be still around, but is clear that CentOS is now a Dev focused operating system not designed or targeted for Stable Enterprise operations with a community of Enterprise SysAdmins around it If you believe the changes are "not all the much" then you are clearly not in touch with the user base of CentOS, outside of Devs that is The changes are GREAT for devs, and Appliance Manufacturers. Maybe even for Cloud customers But for us Old School, OnPrem sysadmins running CentOS for Stability, and Long Term Support, CentOS is most certainly dead
  - freedomben 6y ago
    > is clear that CentOS is now a Dev focused operating system not designed or targeted for Stable Enterprise operations with a community of Enterprise SysAdmins around it This is absolutely not true. Would you have described RHEL this way? If not, then you shouldn't describe CentOS this way either. CentOS took RHEL's place in the chain. Instead of Cent being downstream of RHEL, the two were swapped around. > If you believe the changes are "not all the much" then you are clearly not in touch with the user base of CentOS, outside of Devs that is Say what you will. I've been using Cent since 2012 and currently run numerous workloads in production on it. I've shipped SaaS products on top of it and have been responsible for widespread maintenance. I've been a package maintainer for numerous packages as well. > But for us Old School, OnPrem sysadmins running CentOS for Stability, and Long Term Support, CentOS is most certainly dead I know plenty of old school on prem sysadmins who run CentOS for stability and LTS (I'm one of them. I have 3 bare metal machines in prod at the moment running CentOS). I may go with Rocky for one of those machines (it's a router/load balancer), I haven't fully decided yet. That said I agree with you somewhat, that is the one area where this change could be somewhat negative. However, with CentOS being week and months behind RHEL right now, do you see that as a good thing? Do you like having an unpatched system for days or weeks at a time when an embargoed security fix hits RHEL and has to wait for CentOS to build and distribute? I don't. Security patches are top priority for me. Edit: Blog post mentioned is now live: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
fortran77 6y ago
Now that you can run Amazon Linux 2 in a VM on your own machine, we're simply switching to that. It's nearly the same system. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l... (And there's pre-built boxes for Vagrant, etc. Search the Vagrant boxes to see it.)
- bassman9000 6y ago
  We have an internal RHEL vs AMZ Linux 2 battle, because of the RHEL support (would be a no brainer for AMZ otherwise). And it's tilting, because we run almost everything in Docker now, and we're not entering the OpenShift/podman ecosystem.
- em500 6y ago
  AFAICT, Amazon Linux 2 is largely based on RHEL 7, not 8. So not at all nearly the same system. If you're "simply switching" from CentOS 8 to Amazon Linux 2, prepare to put some serious work into it.
indigodaddy 6y ago
I’m a little surprised that Jim Whitehurst would let this happen.
marmot777 6y ago
What happens to Fedora in all this? That project okay?
- xony 6y ago
  Fedora was long dead ? haven't heard since 2008
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    ...what? Fedora Linux nee Fedora Core has been doing fine - https://getfedora.org/ https://getfedora.org/
- freedomben 6y ago
  Fedora won't be changing at all. It's always been the upstream of the next major version of RHEL. Now it will be the upstream of the next major version of CentOS and CentOS will be the upstream of the next minor version of RHEL. By the time stuff makes it to CentOS it will have had lots of time to bake, will have passed RHEL QA, CI, etc. If you want to read more details about the changes, I wrote a long blog here: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
  - marmot777 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll read it as, frankly, I've not had time yet to understand exactly what's going on.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Yeah it's surprisingly nuanced and took me time to grok it as well. Part of the challenge was there wasn't really an organized collection of info so people were left to speculate and make assumptions. Happy to answer any questions you may have afterward, though if you post them here I may miss them but my email is in my profile.
rrauenza 6y ago
Since Centos Stream is upstream of RHEL, is it possible for an organization downstream to just manage a set of repositories (or whitelists) so that it only releases the Centos Stream versions that reached RHEL?
- freedomben 6y ago
  I need to be careful of what I say so I'm going to be annoyingly cryptic, but others have had this thought and are looking into it. Stay tuned :-)
xony 6y ago
mint OS community welcomes you :)
- xet7 6y ago
  Is there any mention about it on Linux Mint website? Mint only has desktop .iso images. No server .iso images without desktop. Mint also mixes packages from Debian and Ubuntu that would probably cause conflicts on server usage. CentOS is usually used on servers, with server .iso images without desktop.
xony 6y ago
IBM goes oracle way , they want more money
- leokennis 6y ago
  Goes? Went, a loooong time ago. An IBM mainframe is shipped in two boxes: a small one and a huge one. The first contains the computer. The second one the pricing table.
1e-9 6y ago
CentOS has had a stability advantage by being downstream of RHEL. It makes sense to switch the free version to be upstream of the paid version. Unexpectedly changing CentOS 8 after many had already migrated to it makes no sense and thoroughly damages Red Hat’s reputation in my view. Perhaps Red Hat will consider continuing CentOS 8 under the same terms they had promised, while also releasing CentOS Stream. Many would value earlier updates over additional stability and make the switch willingly. The rest would avoid having the rug yanked out from under them without warning. Obviously, this dual path would require more effort, but it would engender more trust in Red Hat going forward even if we knew there would be no CentOS 9. It would also keep many from migrating elsewhere.
lazylizard 6y ago
so use rocky scientic or oracle linux if you're married to yum or compile your stuff with static libraries maybe?

222 points by vanburen 6y ago

Article kind of hints at it but I suspect RHEL is going to get a new licensing model to capture the CentOS crowd under the RHEL umbrella. Once that's done it will be easier to upsell support contracts since they'll have the users in their license DB.

Spivak 6y ago
I’m honestly surprised they don’t just make RHEL free and take the CentOS market for themselves. Gate the current RHEL specific features behind support contracts and call it a day. Why make your customers have to migrate to pay you?
- josephcsible 6y ago
  This is what Oracle Linux already does, so Red Hat is only hurting themselves by not doing so, since anyone who wants this can just go to Oracle. (Notwithstanding the fact that Oracle is evil.)
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Yea, going to Oracle is always a bad idea and they'll find a way to get money out of you. It's pretty common for me to convert customers from Oracle JRE/JDK to OpenJDK/JDE when Oracle says they need to pay millions for no good reason.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Look I just did an Oracle to OpenJDK transition for the same reason but I don't really think Java SE licensing is an example of Oracle being particularly Oracle. It's just that Oracle Java isn't free and they're doing what every company is doing switching from one-time license fees to subscriptions.
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      But here's the kicker: the worst thing Oracle can possibly do is to say "yeah, that whole Linux distro that we used to give you for free? We're not doing that anymore." So even if you do move to Oracle Linux and they go full evil, you're no worse off than you are on CentOS right now.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Disagree: RH isn't likely to sue you.
- bonzini 6y ago
  There are no RHEL specific features.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Au contraire, there are and they're quite valuable their enterprise customers. The most important is the detailed security errata published along side their RPM packages which are necessary to do things like "only install security updates" or "check if any packages have upatched vulns." RHEL but not CentOS also come with security/regulatory profiles like STIG which are necessary to run in certain environments like the DoD. Red Hat also has a license to distribute Oracle Java that CentOS lacks and so it's not available in their repos. They also ship with the Cisco network drivers that CentOS again doesn't have a license to distribute.
    - cesarb 6y ago
      There's also the extended support for minor releases. With RHEL, it's possible to stay in a minor release for longer while in CentOS you always have to migrate to the next minor release. For instance, according to the graphic at the middle of https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata with Extended Update Support one can stay at RHEL 8.2 until the middle of 2022 (so RHEL 8.2 has a full 2 years of support), while with CentOS, you had to migrate to CentOS 8.3 this month if you want to keep receiving updates (so CentOS 8.2 had only 6 months of support before being replaced with CentOS 8.3).
- freedomben 6y ago
  Yeah I really wonder if this is coming. It's wishful thinking on my end so maybe isn't reasonable, but man it'd be neat. I get annoyed when people point out "you can already get a dev license for free." Sure, but there are hoops to jump through and you can't run it "in production" (which I think is mostly a meaningless claim, but still not something I like). Nevertheless I'm optimistic and hope they announce it sooner rather than later. Hopefully the current blowback will move things along ;-)
acomjean 6y ago
It doesn’t surprise me. CentOS usage is huge. If they can turn 20% into paying customers it would be a huge revenue win for IBM. One hopes this newfound revenue goes toward making Linux better, but we will see. Red hat employees work on a lot of core things.
syshum 6y ago
If this is their plan they have screwed up pretty bad and shows a clear mis understanding of enterprise customers We like stability, if they were going to change RHEL licensing to capture CentOS enterprise customers they should have announced those changes ahead or in tandem with the CentOS Announcement The CentOS Announcment as is read was "Hello Enterprise Users of CentOS, we know we promised to support CentOS 8 until 2029, April Fools, now we are going to cut support at the end of 2021, and maybe we will have some options for you early 2021 so call us" This uncertainty and betrayal of trust is going to be hard to come back from
- ikiris 6y ago
  Yep exactly. This is outright refusal to use anything they produce going forward, as they've shown that long term commitments mean absolutely nothing.
ikiris 6y ago
Doesn't matter, they poisoned the well with this.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

So, what I don’t understand is that I thought the whole point of CentOS was that RedHat didn’t control it? I guess I missed the acquisition announcement, but a RedHat-owned CentOS makes a lot less sense to me.

pushrax 6y ago
The whole point was that it was free. I’m not aware of anyone choosing CentOS over RHEL because of the governance structure. The feature set of CentOS directly depended on decisions by Red Hat anyway.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  I would be suspicious of running essential business operations on a free version of a product the company also sells licenses for: I’d always be wondering if they’re going to change strategy on me.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Beggars can't be choosers and I don't know of another free distro providing 10 years of updates.
bombcar 6y ago
CentOS was dying and RedHat was a no-brainer to take over maintenance. Dying as in lacking resources and developers - not users. They err really starting to lag upstream.
marcinzm 6y ago
The point as I saw it was that CentOS didn't require a licensing fee. RedHat decided to make them into an official free version whose users they could then upsell onto licenses. IBM seems to have decided that they'd make more money in this segment by squeezing licenses out of existing users and killing the product.
- 6y ago

chasil 6y ago

Many years ago, I fondly used and documented the free and open Red Hat distribution, which ended with release 9 in 2003. I still have a hard drive with the original Red Hat 6 based on System V init, not the later v6 based on Upstart. There was a great feeling of abandonment then that is nostalgic in the death of CentOS now. In the years that have passed, I saw a few licenses purchased in my workplace, then support suddenly stopped by corporate sources who instructed all license holders to convert our installs to Oracle Linux support. I remembered my feeling of abandonment by Red Hat, ran the script without complaint, and all was well. In later years, focus returned to Red Hat licensing, and I was strongly encouraged to reinstall my Oracle Linux systems (which had grown greatly, as they were free). I resisted vehemently, objecting to an inferior kernel (compared to the UEK), reduced hardware support, and the pointless inconvenience of license keys, activation, and renewals for a product of generally lower quality. Fortunately, I have avoided this inconvenience. In light of the decades of Red Hat's behavior, I will say one thing: you reap what you sow.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> In light of the decades of Red Hat's behavior, I will say one thing: you reap what you sow. I'm surprised to hear you say that, because this is exactly why I personally won't touch anything from Oracle with a ten-foot pole; I'm not fond of RH yanking support, but we're talking about the company that is known throughout the industry for license audits and calls from legal as a sales strategy. Is there some reason why you trust this particular product more?

qz2 6y ago

IBM sure knows how to piss off its potential customers.

josho 6y ago
The intersection of centos users and IBM customers is likely quite small. Even the tech teams inside large organizations aren’t IBM’s customer.
- spijdar 6y ago
  While CentOS users might not represent that many IBM/RH customers, I suspect CentOS's availability has contributed to RHEL being so widely supported. If fewer people, even people who will never pay, use CentOS, then (potentially) fewer people will explicitly target RHEL/RPMs, and there's a weaker case for enterprises adoption RHEL over its competitors. CentOS led to people learning "how to use RHEL". While RH is going to try to bring developers and other non-commercial uses into free licenses, I'm not sure this will be enough.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    We already did that with Fedora before CentOS existed.

kim0 6y ago

Sure enough, the community started https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ as quick as redhat killed it!

qz2 6y ago
Next step they’ll stop publishing the RPM spec files or change the license on them. Edit: why the downvotes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bonzini 6y ago
  They (we, I work at Red Hat) would have no engineering department the second after.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Yes but to be clear the folk that may make that decision may not be aware of that. I’ve been in that situation before myself.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      They do (I know them, and I have talked to them since Wednesday). That's not to say this was not a screwup, but I would say that rumors around the death of free RHEL rebuilds have been greatly exaggerated.
      - qz2 6y ago
        After a PR fuck up this large I am disinclined to agree.
        bonzini 6y ago
        I would be too, but I know the people.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Goddammit! I was planning a whole CentOS-based encrypted web service. SHIT! At least we haven't bought any hardware yet... back to the drawing board.

ldng 6y ago
Look up Springdale. It is essentially the same concept.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation.
sitzkrieg 6y ago
if only there is some other linux based software out there!
deadbunny 6y ago
Why are you tied to CentOS?
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  There's no particular reason. The OS layer is just another variable which needs to be accounted for in the planning stage, so pulling the rug out like this is a nuisance.

jsperson 6y ago

The most frustrating part of Linux for me is all the damn mental CPU cycle I have to spend keeping up with the naming and positioning of the various distros. Often it borders on drama. The other day I commented that I took my Pinebook Pro off the toy shelf and loaded up Manjaro. I commented on HN about how much I liked the user experience. The first reply I got was something about the drama with some dude named Phil. Alternatively I’ll put my head down for a while and forget about the lineage of the various options and then something will crop up about this or that distro is going away, being repositioned or whatnot. Why does this matter? Because I want to use it for real work and I don’t want to spend time planning a long term OS strategy. There are other things to worry about. I’m far from alone in this. That’s why folks reach for Mac OS and Windows. Downvote away, but I really do want to love Linux. I just don’t want it to be so hard to love.

gameswithgo 6y ago
yeah for people just wanting to do work and not have the os be the hobby it is trying at times.
tobinfricke 6y ago
Just use Ubuntu
- nullsense 6y ago
  Then what about the snap drama?
  - monsieurgaufre 6y ago
    My snap folder only has chromium in it. Like probably most users who don't (and shouldn't) care about snaps. The snap drama is a ideological purity contest by people who should know better (aka use something else than Ubuntu if that pisses them off that much).
  - mceachen 6y ago
    Don't use snap.

cutler 6y ago

I hope I don't end-up having to switch my servers to Ubuntu. yum/dnf is just so much easier than apt-get.

CharlesW 6y ago
Question from someone who doesn't use Linux much: Are package managers distro-specific, then?
- Shared404 6y ago
  > Are package managers distro-specific, then? Technically no, effectively yes. You can install and use different package managers on different distros, but with the exception of things like cargo it's highly recommended to not, as you are likely going to break your system.
- inimino 6y ago
  Yes. Package management is most of what a distro does.
- doublepg23 6y ago
  Package managers are one of the main things that define a distro. The big split is between packaging formats (DEB and RPM [0]) and then there are package managers for that for that (apt* for DEBs and yum, dnf, zypper etc. for RPMs [1]). You could run a foreign package manager on any distro, there even exist ones for that purpose [2], but it's ostensibly considered a defining feature for a distro. [0] There are more of course, but those are the big two. [1] I'm really only familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu space (Deb) [2] See flatpak, snap, and nix/guix. Also some distros like Bedrock Linux let you have completely foreign environments mixing together.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Kind of. When you hear people say they use a "Debian based" distro they'll be using apt as their package manager. You have 3 main "base" distros/package mamagers: Debian/apt RHEL/yum/dnf Arch/pacman/pkgbuild There are of course many more but these are the overwhelming majority. This means if I wanted to make my own distro I could do as little as take Debian stable as my upstream, rebuild a few packages with a s/Debian/MyDisro/g and change a few default packages and call it that. Or I could track a mix of packages from Debian testing and stable. Or I could decide I prefer to build everything my self but still use apt for my package manager. This is of course turtles all the way down eg: Mint is based of Ubuntu which is based of Debian.

fanatic2pope 6y ago

The IBM bean counters have spoken and Red Hat is to be squeezed of every last drop of revenue. I bet they are demanding Red Hat employees apply for patents for everything they are working on too.

jlgaddis 6y ago

I don't think it's fair to attribute this to IBM. An outcome like this was expected as far back as 2014 -- it just took longer than most of us expected. As I've said before, CentOS hasn't been a "community" enterprise operating system for a long, long time now.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

That was to be expected for a long time. Embrace (financing most of Linux development, with SuSE historically a close 2nd), Extend (introduce Linuxisms such as systemd, containers), Extinguish (make putting together all the F/OSS amounting to a complete O/S an art, make changes for the sake of it, sell "support"). What's not answered is why now, in the middle of an active CentOS release cycle? Smells like IBM/RH doesn't see growth in new enterprise customers/startups coming to Linux (going to clouds/k8s instead and focusing on creating Docker images for workloads). RedHat surely must've been fully aware that discontinuing CentOS would create a giant backlash. I guess, like me, few people haven't used CentOS as base for new builds anyway; OTOH corporate clouds (OpenShift, k8s) for big customers seems like an attractive market for IBM/RH. Edit: a good outcome of this catastrophe might be to shift focus towards POSIX, LSB, and other means for portability which historically had strong following in the Linux and BSD communities

senko 6y ago
Financing development of Linux is a bad thing? Introducing Linuxisms in ... Linux? And the only thing they're extinguishing is a free (as in beer) distro that they controlled anyway (and choose not to continue putting resources into).
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Financing development of Linux is a bad thing? When they do it by screwing over their users, yes. > Introducing Linuxisms in ... Linux? Introducing non-portable ways of doing things that were previously portable to non-Linux OSs, yes. It's certainly a minor point since if anything some of those changes increased portability within the Linux ecosystem, but I can sorta see "introducing Linuxisms in areas that previously weren't Linux-specific" (ex. `service foo start` did the same thing on RHEL and FreeBSD; `systemctl start foo` isn't going to be a thing on any BSD).
  - senko 6y ago
    > When they do it by screwing over their users, yes. I agree that screwing over your users is a bad thing, but I do think RH contribute a lot of time, money and effort in a way that benefits a larger Linux user base. Just by looking at Linux kernel contributions, RH are one of the largest companies contributing developer time. > Introducing non-portable ways of doing things that were previously portable to non-Linux OSs. I think SysVinit was going to be replaced sooner than later. There's a lot to be desired in a way that some systemd developers evangelized it, but the other major alternative (upstart) was also a Linuxism. Even BSD systems are moving (or considering moving) away from it. From all the "standard" Unixisims, I think that's one of the parts that's aged the worst, and it was a matter of time before various operating systems (BSDs, Linux distros,...) replaced it.

aftbit 6y ago

What did CentOS offer that Debian did not? In other words, if you're not paying for RHEL support, why would you want to use RHEL?

justahuman74 6y ago
Some expensive software will demand you use particular distros for them to support you Example: https://www.synopsys.com/support/licensing-installation-computeplatforms/compute-platforms/compute-platforms-roadmap.html https://www.synopsys.com/support/licensing-installation-comp...
kdump_8 6y ago
There is a lot of software that only officially runs on RHEL-likes. E.g. Oracle Database only supports on RHEL-likes and SLES.
bluedino 6y ago
Vendor support. We have a couple software packages that we run that require CentOS/RHEL.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
CentOS releases were supported for much longer (10 years vs 3+2 years)
joecot 6y ago
Let's say you run RHEL on your production servers. You pay for licensing those servers, which gives you Red Hat support, and also because you have proprietary software which is only supported on Red Hat. You pay a pretty penny for those production servers. But you also need development servers, and staging servers. For those servers, RHEL would be a gigantic waste of money. It's the production servers you need enterprise support for, none of the rest. CentOS was a downstream release of Red Hat, with the same packages from Red Hat compiled. It was, for the most part, identical to Red Hat without the support. This meant you could develop on CentOS Dev Servers and test deployment on CentOS Staging servers, and expect it to work exactly the same when you sent it to production. Lots of less licensing costs, same results. Now, CentOS Stream will be upstream of Red Hat. Instead of getting the same packages as Red Hat, now you're getting the testing packages of Red Hat. You can no longer expect to get the same results from CentOS stream as from RHEL. The end of life for updates for existing CentOS releases has also been moved up drastically. By all appearances, Red Hat and IBM are essentially forcing companies to license and use RHEL on their dev and staging servers, by making CentOS Stream unusable for it. Lucky for many, Canonical went and got Ubuntu certified for many of the same proprietary hardware and software systems that were previously only supported for proprietary linux distros. This means your dev, staging, and production can all be the exact same distro, and the only difference is which servers you're paying for Canonical support for. This is a recentish change though, so many companies locked into Red Hat / CentOS because of the clear path that was established between Development and Production. And certainly not every proprietary software/hardware is supported on Ubuntu, yet. Lots of companies won't switch (the structure of Red Hat to Debian is pretty drastically different), and IBM is counting on that.

freedomben 6y ago

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but I'm here entirely with my own opinion My God, it's been a long time (if ever) since I've seen so much misinformation out there. I mostly blame Red Hat for the very poor delivery, but tech people are not immune to the tendency for dramatizing, misrepresenting, and polarizing. Please stop spreading this. CentOS is NOT dead. CentOS is changing, but not all that much (yes, really). I'll do my best to answer questions here, but I'm also going to rush a blog post to try and get it out ASAP that corrects a lot of this. Edit: Here's the blog post. Excuse typos and other things, I rushed this ;-) https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...

syshum 6y ago
Sorry but yes CentOS is dead CentOS, is COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE OPERATING SYSTEM The community is dead, the Enterprise part of the Operating system is dead Sure the CentOS name will be still around, but is clear that CentOS is now a Dev focused operating system not designed or targeted for Stable Enterprise operations with a community of Enterprise SysAdmins around it If you believe the changes are "not all the much" then you are clearly not in touch with the user base of CentOS, outside of Devs that is The changes are GREAT for devs, and Appliance Manufacturers. Maybe even for Cloud customers But for us Old School, OnPrem sysadmins running CentOS for Stability, and Long Term Support, CentOS is most certainly dead
- freedomben 6y ago
  > is clear that CentOS is now a Dev focused operating system not designed or targeted for Stable Enterprise operations with a community of Enterprise SysAdmins around it This is absolutely not true. Would you have described RHEL this way? If not, then you shouldn't describe CentOS this way either. CentOS took RHEL's place in the chain. Instead of Cent being downstream of RHEL, the two were swapped around. > If you believe the changes are "not all the much" then you are clearly not in touch with the user base of CentOS, outside of Devs that is Say what you will. I've been using Cent since 2012 and currently run numerous workloads in production on it. I've shipped SaaS products on top of it and have been responsible for widespread maintenance. I've been a package maintainer for numerous packages as well. > But for us Old School, OnPrem sysadmins running CentOS for Stability, and Long Term Support, CentOS is most certainly dead I know plenty of old school on prem sysadmins who run CentOS for stability and LTS (I'm one of them. I have 3 bare metal machines in prod at the moment running CentOS). I may go with Rocky for one of those machines (it's a router/load balancer), I haven't fully decided yet. That said I agree with you somewhat, that is the one area where this change could be somewhat negative. However, with CentOS being week and months behind RHEL right now, do you see that as a good thing? Do you like having an unpatched system for days or weeks at a time when an embargoed security fix hits RHEL and has to wait for CentOS to build and distribute? I don't. Security patches are top priority for me. Edit: Blog post mentioned is now live: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...

fortran77 6y ago

Now that you can run Amazon Linux 2 in a VM on your own machine, we're simply switching to that. It's nearly the same system. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l... (And there's pre-built boxes for Vagrant, etc. Search the Vagrant boxes to see it.)

bassman9000 6y ago
We have an internal RHEL vs AMZ Linux 2 battle, because of the RHEL support (would be a no brainer for AMZ otherwise). And it's tilting, because we run almost everything in Docker now, and we're not entering the OpenShift/podman ecosystem.
em500 6y ago
AFAICT, Amazon Linux 2 is largely based on RHEL 7, not 8. So not at all nearly the same system. If you're "simply switching" from CentOS 8 to Amazon Linux 2, prepare to put some serious work into it.

indigodaddy 6y ago

I’m a little surprised that Jim Whitehurst would let this happen.

marmot777 6y ago

What happens to Fedora in all this? That project okay?

xony 6y ago
Fedora was long dead ? haven't heard since 2008
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  ...what? Fedora Linux nee Fedora Core has been doing fine - https://getfedora.org/ https://getfedora.org/
freedomben 6y ago
Fedora won't be changing at all. It's always been the upstream of the next major version of RHEL. Now it will be the upstream of the next major version of CentOS and CentOS will be the upstream of the next minor version of RHEL. By the time stuff makes it to CentOS it will have had lots of time to bake, will have passed RHEL QA, CI, etc. If you want to read more details about the changes, I wrote a long blog here: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252 https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
- marmot777 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll read it as, frankly, I've not had time yet to understand exactly what's going on.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yeah it's surprisingly nuanced and took me time to grok it as well. Part of the challenge was there wasn't really an organized collection of info so people were left to speculate and make assumptions. Happy to answer any questions you may have afterward, though if you post them here I may miss them but my email is in my profile.

rrauenza 6y ago

Since Centos Stream is upstream of RHEL, is it possible for an organization downstream to just manage a set of repositories (or whitelists) so that it only releases the Centos Stream versions that reached RHEL?

freedomben 6y ago
I need to be careful of what I say so I'm going to be annoyingly cryptic, but others have had this thought and are looking into it. Stay tuned :-)

xony 6y ago

mint OS community welcomes you :)

xet7 6y ago
Is there any mention about it on Linux Mint website? Mint only has desktop .iso images. No server .iso images without desktop. Mint also mixes packages from Debian and Ubuntu that would probably cause conflicts on server usage. CentOS is usually used on servers, with server .iso images without desktop.

xony 6y ago

IBM goes oracle way , they want more money

leokennis 6y ago
Goes? Went, a loooong time ago. An IBM mainframe is shipped in two boxes: a small one and a huge one. The first contains the computer. The second one the pricing table.

1e-9 6y ago

CentOS has had a stability advantage by being downstream of RHEL. It makes sense to switch the free version to be upstream of the paid version. Unexpectedly changing CentOS 8 after many had already migrated to it makes no sense and thoroughly damages Red Hat’s reputation in my view. Perhaps Red Hat will consider continuing CentOS 8 under the same terms they had promised, while also releasing CentOS Stream. Many would value earlier updates over additional stability and make the switch willingly. The rest would avoid having the rug yanked out from under them without warning. Obviously, this dual path would require more effort, but it would engender more trust in Red Hat going forward even if we knew there would be no CentOS 9. It would also keep many from migrating elsewhere.

lazylizard 6y ago

so use rocky scientic or oracle linux if you're married to yum or compile your stuff with static libraries maybe?