8 ms·

Chef cofounder on CentOS: It’s time to open source everything

187 points by ashitlerferad 6y ago

andreacavagna 6y ago
> One way that open source companies are doing this model to fantastic effect is by open sourcing their upstream and creating a cloud distribution (read: managed service). A variety of companies have embraced this model to greater or lesser extents. COSS is the emerging Business model, and helps entrepreneur take the best from Open-source and Cloud
- atian 6y ago
  This is a very generalized statement to make for a Linux distribution.
insensible 6y ago
Currently down (database error). https://web.archive.org/web/20201221102928/https://planetstoryline.com/chef-cofounder-on-centos-its-time-to-open-source-everything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201221102928/https://planetsto...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  The HN Hug of Death™.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- js4ever 6y ago
  It's just a regular Wordpress website without caching nor CDN, it fails after 15 RPS
Galanwe 6y ago
Side topic: I see references everywhere (including this article) that the "co-founder of CentOS started a new distribution: Rocky Linux". I am not familiar with the history of CentOS, so I tried to understand who Gregory Kurtzer is, and to be honest, I am still not quite sure what he did for CentOS. My understanding is that he helped start the project and more or less helped it grow during the first 2 years, then was somehow removed from the leading board? https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/ https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/ This story is very unclear to me. It seems McGaugh started CentOS, and then handed it over to "someone in the UK" instead of Gregory Kurtzer. https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Gregory_Kurtzer_discusses_plans_for_Rocky_Linux_with_Wikinews_as_Red_Hat_announces_moving_focus_away_from_CentOS https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Gregory_Kurtzer_discusses_pla... The second article make it seem like McGaugh was some kind of employee of Kurtzer: > One of our developers, Rocky McGaugh, quickly rebuilt the sources in RHEL to give us a stable foundation. That was the beginning of CentOS I really don't want to start a flame war here, just curious of understanding who this guy is really.
- physicsguy 6y ago
  Greg Kurtzer has done a lot of other stuff since leaving CentOS though, mostly in the HPC sphere. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley lab and started Warewulf for cluster admin. He started Singularity (basically Docker for HPC).
- toyg 6y ago
  I mean, it's on wikipedia: "Prior to becoming known under its current name, CentOS originated as a build of CAOS Linux, which was started by Gregory Kurtzer." There are a bunch of items on Distrowatch about caos, going all the way back to 2004, like https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=02134 https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=02134 that qualifies him as "the leader of cAos Foundation of cAos and CentOS fame". It seems clear from a quick googling that Greg started the project; once Rocky McGough entered the picture, Greg handed him the technical reins while he "continued to manage the project, community, and governance side of things", until he moved on. (Side note: Distrowatch is one of the unsung pillars of the Linux ecosystem. For all its drawbacks, it has run for almost 20 years, and still works fine as a quick way to survey the field of Linux distributions.)
jabberwcky 6y ago
> That’s the strategy. That’s the magic. You don’t need to go Open Core or any other permutation of kind-of, sort-of open source. You can open source everything and just ensure you have a rock-solid managed cloud service. This reliance on cloud is what’s driving MongoDB, Confluent, DataStax, Redis Labs, and others to great success. It can be your model, too. It's not clear how this would work with a Linux distribution that has already been commoditized by the cloud vendors. Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand, and probably soon Amazon Linux will stand on its own feet similar to ElasticSearch, thanks to the Red Hat move
- cowsandmilk 6y ago
  > Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand AL2 doesn’t map up to a single version of CentOS already and Amazon would probably be happy to move to being upstream of RHEL for the sake of their kernel team. Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product.
  - koolba 6y ago
    > Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product. Amazon Linux outside of Amazon is purely to facilitate local build and test pipelines, both of which are meant to encourage AWS deployments. They don’t directly make money off it.
    - schoolornot 6y ago
      A shame b/c they would get a ton of developer love by giving us what CentOS did.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Yes, the issue isn't that people want another Red Hat family ecosystem distro. That want one that (nearly) exactly mirrors a specific RHEL point release plus major bug and security patches backports.
hbbio 6y ago
"Error establishing a database connection" In 2020, you would expect websites not to require a database connection for main views - or at least support a degraded mode (tracking off...).
- ArcticCelt 6y ago
  Here some workaround https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ahQ75XwdCgJ:https://planetstoryline.com/chef-cofounder-on-centos-its-time-to-open-source-everything/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ahQ75...
- jhowell 6y ago
  I think the problem is more related to the skilleset of the blog owner, which may not necessarily be in devops but instead economics or journalism or other (tough to say without being able to acess the content). It's a feature not a bug that we all have different skills. I certainly do not want to discourage others from sharing their opinions due to technical issues that could be resolved more easily by developers (through their implementation and documentation) as much if not more than end users in a given situation.
  - pepemon 6y ago
    Yeah, adding a little bit of caching (at least as WordPress plugin without dependencies for external entities) is now the DevOps problem that requires the DevOps solution, nice. Well, I mean, you can front the blog with Cloudflare using their wizard for free without any technical knowledge. What kind of DevOps magic do you need there?
    - menacingly 6y ago
      You I guess need the knowledge that you need to do that.
    - jhowell 6y ago
      Maybe changing the default settings based on user experience, or the implementation of a caching layer of some sort for infrequently changing blogs posts (seems that could be the majority) or making the importance of these settings more accessible to the people who use them and aren't developers in layman's terms. I don't use WordPress or blog personally. I do imagine that this particular issue is causing the author of the post anxiety due to it's unforseen (to them) failure. I'd prefer the computer not discourage them.
dimitar 6y ago
I think the twitter posts are more straight to the point: https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1337062314357514251 https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1337062314357514251 I don't understand why RH don't just allow downloading RH for free like they used to. They tried to funnel non-enterprise types into Fedora - it obviously doesn't work for everyone. There always be an Amazon Linux, Oracle Linux, Scientific or CENTOS, which are not improving RHELs brand.
- gtirloni 6y ago
  At this point, there's little trust that RH wouldn't change the terms on a free RHEL offering at some point in the future.
- dralley 6y ago
  The announcement hinted that that was the plan, to expand the developer program to cover cases like dev/staging servers that don't need active support. Personal opinion: They shouldn't have announced anything until those plans were ready, it would save everyone a lot of headaches.
Demiurge 6y ago
Why not just create Red Hat Live or something less confusing and disruptive to existing users? Perhaps upsetting people and making the news is part of the goal.
- garmaine 6y ago
  More likely because CentOS was (viewed to be) displacing RHEL sales.
  - Demiurge 6y ago
    Can they not foresee Rocky Linux or one of many existing alternative distros? It’s an inconvenience to switch, but I don’t see that working.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Long-lived forks are few and far between. RH might be betting on the fact that the ecosystem is effectively not as lively or motivated as it was in the ‘00s. In the worst case, they gain a few months while a solid alternative emerges, and a few years before it can match CentOS’s reputation. The strength of CentOS was its longevity, that made it a credible option for reliable long-term production deployment; it takes time to rebuild that level of trust from scratch, and people who have been burnt once will now be twice shy to go with a community project rather than paying RH.
    - flatiron 6y ago
      The script to switch from centos to rocky will only be replacing the repositories and a few branding packages (about a dozen) it won’t be a big deal.
- acdha 6y ago
  Almost everyone I knew who used CentOS was doing so because they were targeting RHEL but didn’t want to buy RHEL licenses for everything (e.g. run RHEL on production servers & CentOS everywhere else). If you didn’t want a close to RHEL experience, you’d likely go with Debian to get more packages and a truly open community. One way of looking at that is to see CentOS as a gateway into the RHEL world, and especially a way for people to get experience with it or test open source software on it. I think that viewpoint just lost out to the other one seeing every CentOS install at a company as lost revenue. That’s not entirely unfounded but I suspect it will produce less revenue and cost them more in network effects than they anticipated. Any open source project, for example, has just been told that they need pay to test Red Hat compatibility.
ryanmjacobs 6y ago
Aside, I really enjoy the stock image. Gotta love "<plist version="VIRUS"> front and center :)
arvindamirtaa 6y ago
Well, looks like HN broke the site.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Stallman was already right, we will never have freedom as long as we use closed sourced software. How can you believe in promises that cannot be validated ?
- wrnr 6y ago
  OSS is neither a sufficient nor necessary for freedom, let's stop pretending it does, for freedom sake.
  - nip180 6y ago
    OSS is an important part of hardware ownership. If I cannot control the software running on my device do I really own the device? If I do not fully control the hardware and software of my devices my ability to participate in the Information Age is limited. OSS is an important aspect of being a free citizen in the Information Age.
    - tw25493606 6y ago
      > If I cannot control the software running on my device do I really own the device? I think that depends on what you mean by "control" and "really own". Recently folks were complaining that Apple is acting as a monopoly because you can't install a non-Safari browser. Of course they're still stuck installing from the app store. So, demand installing from outside the app store, and they're still stuck using iOS. Demand changing the OS, and they're still stuck using Broadcom chips and indirectly supporting the CCP. These are all degrees of control, with associated trade-offs. Being able to easily alter and recompile an application is just one degree of control. There are many others you still won't have until you can fabricate a device from raw materials. And even then maybe your government won't allow you to access the necessary designs and materials (enforced by men with guns). Ultimately, everything is a package deal, and there is really no such thing as "owning" nor "full control", there are just contracts. For example, no one "really owns" their home; they rent the land from the government and (for most folks) the bank. > my ability to participate in the Information Age is limited Indeed, because that system works for its own purposes, not for you. You must conform to it, not vice versa. [1] [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-society-and-its-future#toc17 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-societ...
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Maybe there's another perspective on RedHat's backtracking on CentOS I've not thought about before: that they feel like they do/pay all the hard work when AMZN and others just rebrand RH/CentOS, add their proprietary bits, and merely supply a VM (AMI) image. So they basically want to go after AWS, Azure, Google as customers; just like Google wanted those other cloud providers to contribute to k8s a year or two ago.
- iKevinShah 6y ago
  IANAL and do not have the exact understanding but wouldn't something like Redis's RSAL work in this case but for Cent OS and Cloud providers? Source : https://redislabs.com/redis-source-available-license https://redislabs.com/redis-source-available-license
  - ghaff 6y ago
    You can't relicense a Linux distro to an incompatible (and not even actually open source) license.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  That would be a pretty rich attitude of them to take if this case. It’s not like RHEL is developed from scratch. At least 90% of the products value is tied to the Linux kernel itself. The majority of which comes from development effort outside Red Hat. (How many customers would stay if IBM hypothetically kept the userland and swapped to an AIX kernel?)
  - cat199 6y ago
    true for the components, but not for all of the low-level integration work needed to bundle/assemble these, and all of the development/integration of the installers, etc. there's a reason people use linux distros over building their own
    - pas 6y ago
      RHEL's only real value is the looong support cycle. (And CentOS was the gateway drug, and now probably someone at IBM, beancounter or VP of sales, or someone with an ideology about how to convert free users into paying customers thought that many current CentOS users will just buy RHEL if they really need RHEL7/8. And ... it's hard to think they won't. The "vendor lock-in" happened the moment they picked CentOS instead of Debian/Ubuntu.) The low-level integration is just as good in Debian/Ubuntu land too. Hell, Arch does it too pretty well. (There's an announcement list about manual updates, it's worth subscribing to even if you don't use arch[0], because usually the same change will percolate down on the grapevine and next releases of other distros will also change similarly.) [0] btw, I don't use arch
Brian_K_White 6y ago
The same problem (from the commercial distros point of view) exists for RedHat now, and anyone following the plan of this article. If the software you are trying to sell, is GPL, then anyone can do the same as CentOS at any time. The article suggests users will arrange into two groups, non-paying users of the develelopment version and paying customers of the production-class version. But the production version is still GPL and so anyone can get the production version for free any time they want. Your only option for getting out of that is not to use any GPL software in your super valuable commercial product. That is the GPL deal, which you don't have take. You can take it OR leave it. What RedHat seems to have forgotten was 2 things, which I'm sure they knew very well at some point: - Even non-paying users are more valuable to you as non-paying members of your ecosystem than members of any of your competitors. They are actually what keeps your ecosystem a defacto standard. It is incalculable how valuable it is to be a defacto standard for anything. - Those non-paying users were never and are never going to be paying customers no matter what else you do. Their use is not "lost revenue" because you were never going to get any revenue from them anyway. If they couldn't use your product for free, they'd just use someone else's product for free. There is no "convert them into paying customers". And there is also no "convert them into development version users" either because of see above re GPL. All it is is annoying for everyone, even bystanders, that they keep trying.
- toyg 6y ago
  > But the production version is still GPL and so anyone can get the production version for free any time they want. That's not correct. Anyone who is already a user can. If you restrict distribution of the binaries, you also restrict the amount of people who can get the sources. You cannot impose NDAs or the likes, but you can introduce some restrictions on their overall privileges going forward (i.e. you republish sources? No more patches or support for you - which is basically what RH does with their paying customers). RH could stop publishing sources entirely, if they really wanted to, and just provide them to paying customers on request. They don't do that because it's a nuclear option that would effectively push them out of the Linux ecosystem they've invested so much into dominating (RH is effectively the one company who can steer massive amounts of the Linux ecosystem on its own - as shown by systemd et al).
- 6y ago
T3RMINATED 6y ago
What a DUMMY -- closed source pays the bills son.
Simulacra 6y ago
Is the title supposed to be Chef or Chief?
- _e 6y ago
  That is what I thought as well then I immediately thought about how the people who make custom Android ROMs (and Windows PPC roms before that) are known as 'Chefs' because they are cooking together all of the different pieces that make their ROM unique. No different than someone cobbling together a linux distribution but Jonathan Carter, of Debian, isn't referred to as a Chef. The title should read though, "Cofounder of Chef on Centos being open source." Chef, like Puppet, is used to manage server configurations.
  - Simulacra 6y ago
    AH, I stand corrected> Thank you.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
Open Source is not a magic solution. There are plenty of "open source" projects run by a corporation that are a shit-show because they put the corporations' interests first. Honestly, screw everyone that uses some annoying "Open Source unless you compete with me" license, or doesn't include non-corporate engineers on an oversight board for the project. I don't give a crap if your code is available if you never accept the PRs that I make, or never address the issues I raise. Often these issues stay open for years, and the reason why is almost always the corporation didn't want to fix them. Do they invite the community to provide a fix? Nope. Sure, I can make my own patch for a bug affecting me right now. But then I have to maintain that patch into perpetuity. At that point I'd rather just pay for a commercial proprietary product. So what was the point of the source being open?
jnwatson 6y ago
What failed with Fedora that RHEL couldn't use that as upstream? Wasn't that supposed to be where Centos Stream is going?
- ghaff 6y ago
  RHEL does use Fedora as an upstream but only to rebase major versions. And RHEL may also make different decisions about various components. For example, btfs is now the default file system for Fedora but not RHEL. CentOS Stream is much closer to RHEL. It's basically the ongoing post-CI builds.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Yep, Fedora is where all new and improved Linux software gets integrated, often being the first Linux distribution where it lands. Many projects (GCC, Gnome any likely others) synchronize their release timelines due to this. The end result is a a rather nice and lately also quite stable modern Linux distro one can use on a PC and other platforms (there is a IoT edition now, container image, Fedora based CoreOS and others). Then every ~3 years Red Hat takes a snapshot of a released Fedora version and basically "productizes" it into a new RHEL release. This means many things, such as cutting package dependencies quite a bit to only ship what the customers expect and what can be expected to be maintainable for the 10 years of support RHEL has. There could be also some "RHELification" when a package is expected to have different default behavior than in Fedora, but most of that is done by spec file macros these days, so RHEL-only RHELification patches are thankfully rare. Then after a given RHEL version GA, there are minor releases about twice a year. for RHEL 8 for example you have 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, etc. And this is where CentOS stream actually comes in - it's effectively the continuous RHEL release that makes the point releases possible. Packages are updated for the the next point release and land in CentOS stream, then when all is ready for the next point release of RHEL, it is cut from the properly QAed CentOS stream state, which then starts tracking the next minor release. This is actually quite an improvement for the usecase of software building on top of RHEL, as instead of getting only a big bunch of surprise twice a year, they can now track what will be in the next release and either adjust or report issues soon enough for them to be fixed before the next point release. I'm thinking this rather important fact what CentOS stream actually is got kinda "lost in translation" as you can see various things stated as facts about it that are wrong: "CentOS stream is between Fedora and RHEL" - well, no, it's the source of the next RHEL minor release & nothing goes directly from Fedora to a point release. "CentOS stream is less stable than RHEL/CentOS" - well, it's the next RHEL, nothing that does not pass the high RHEL standards is expected to land in it for obvious reasons.
holoway 6y ago
I’m Adam Jacob (the quoted person in Matt’s article). Happy to answer questions :)
- boulos 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. What’s your take on the state of “run your own service, beat out the cloud providers”? Is there something particular you’d taken away from Chef “vs” AWS’s OpsWorks? The article waves this away a little too much for me: > Could someone take that upstream and create a competitive downstream competitor? Of course. But no one should be able to out-Yugabyte on their home turf. > Or take Redis Labs. The company has fiddled with licensing over the last few years...
  - holoway 6y ago
    It’s working pretty well for everyone. OpsWorks revenue was smaller than Chef. It grew our pie. Elastic, Redis, Mongo - all far bigger businesses with AWS competitions with them, seeing big growth in their cloud businesses. Having AWS, Azure, or GCP validate your technology, product, and market is a huge win. Being the prime creator of the product puts you in a very advantageous position (new features, deep support, better user experience). Like the “normal” open source channel, you don’t collect all of the funnel. You do get a new channel (users of rival cloud providers) that operates at a disadvantage compared to your offering (at all but scale, and that’s not an impenetrable one). Those are well qualified users, accustomed to paying for the software. They’re great leads. Downstream competitors are net good for you. Yes, it means other people get some of the revenue. But some of those would never have used the software in the first place without that competitor, or wouldn’t be used to paying for it. The increase in usage more than makes up for it.
    - boulos 6y ago
      Thanks for the quick response! Let me clarify though. Each of Elastic, Redis (Labs) and Mongo (and many others) have put licenses in place to explicitly exclude people from taking their code and turn it into a service. I think that’s fine and their right, as much as making any propriety software (including source available) is someone’s option. But you seem to have a different view about upstream (fully open?) and downstream (scarcity) that I wanted to understand more clearly.
jrsj 6y ago
I know this is a little bit of a tangent but after all this I have no intention of using a Red Hat derivative again. Debian is fine and perfectly stable.

187 points by ashitlerferad 6y ago

> One way that open source companies are doing this model to fantastic effect is by open sourcing their upstream and creating a cloud distribution (read: managed service). A variety of companies have embraced this model to greater or lesser extents. COSS is the emerging Business model, and helps entrepreneur take the best from Open-source and Cloud

atian 6y ago
This is a very generalized statement to make for a Linux distribution.

insensible 6y ago

Currently down (database error). https://web.archive.org/web/20201221102928/https://planetstoryline.com/chef-cofounder-on-centos-its-time-to-open-source-everything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201221102928/https://planetsto...

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
The HN Hug of Death™.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
js4ever 6y ago
It's just a regular Wordpress website without caching nor CDN, it fails after 15 RPS

Galanwe 6y ago

Side topic: I see references everywhere (including this article) that the "co-founder of CentOS started a new distribution: Rocky Linux". I am not familiar with the history of CentOS, so I tried to understand who Gregory Kurtzer is, and to be honest, I am still not quite sure what he did for CentOS. My understanding is that he helped start the project and more or less helped it grow during the first 2 years, then was somehow removed from the leading board? https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/ https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/ This story is very unclear to me. It seems McGaugh started CentOS, and then handed it over to "someone in the UK" instead of Gregory Kurtzer. https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Gregory_Kurtzer_discusses_plans_for_Rocky_Linux_with_Wikinews_as_Red_Hat_announces_moving_focus_away_from_CentOS https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Gregory_Kurtzer_discusses_pla... The second article make it seem like McGaugh was some kind of employee of Kurtzer: > One of our developers, Rocky McGaugh, quickly rebuilt the sources in RHEL to give us a stable foundation. That was the beginning of CentOS I really don't want to start a flame war here, just curious of understanding who this guy is really.

physicsguy 6y ago
Greg Kurtzer has done a lot of other stuff since leaving CentOS though, mostly in the HPC sphere. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley lab and started Warewulf for cluster admin. He started Singularity (basically Docker for HPC).
toyg 6y ago
I mean, it's on wikipedia: "Prior to becoming known under its current name, CentOS originated as a build of CAOS Linux, which was started by Gregory Kurtzer." There are a bunch of items on Distrowatch about caos, going all the way back to 2004, like https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=02134 https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=02134 that qualifies him as "the leader of cAos Foundation of cAos and CentOS fame". It seems clear from a quick googling that Greg started the project; once Rocky McGough entered the picture, Greg handed him the technical reins while he "continued to manage the project, community, and governance side of things", until he moved on. (Side note: Distrowatch is one of the unsung pillars of the Linux ecosystem. For all its drawbacks, it has run for almost 20 years, and still works fine as a quick way to survey the field of Linux distributions.)

jabberwcky 6y ago

> That’s the strategy. That’s the magic. You don’t need to go Open Core or any other permutation of kind-of, sort-of open source. You can open source everything and just ensure you have a rock-solid managed cloud service. This reliance on cloud is what’s driving MongoDB, Confluent, DataStax, Redis Labs, and others to great success. It can be your model, too. It's not clear how this would work with a Linux distribution that has already been commoditized by the cloud vendors. Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand, and probably soon Amazon Linux will stand on its own feet similar to ElasticSearch, thanks to the Red Hat move

cowsandmilk 6y ago
> Amazon Linux is a CentOS rebrand AL2 doesn’t map up to a single version of CentOS already and Amazon would probably be happy to move to being upstream of RHEL for the sake of their kernel team. Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product.
- koolba 6y ago
  > Note AWS has a known limited set of hardware. While they do allow install of Amazon Linux outside AWS, that isn’t core to the business or product. Amazon Linux outside of Amazon is purely to facilitate local build and test pipelines, both of which are meant to encourage AWS deployments. They don’t directly make money off it.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    A shame b/c they would get a ton of developer love by giving us what CentOS did.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yes, the issue isn't that people want another Red Hat family ecosystem distro. That want one that (nearly) exactly mirrors a specific RHEL point release plus major bug and security patches backports.

hbbio 6y ago

"Error establishing a database connection" In 2020, you would expect websites not to require a database connection for main views - or at least support a degraded mode (tracking off...).

ArcticCelt 6y ago
Here some workaround https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ahQ75XwdCgJ:https://planetstoryline.com/chef-cofounder-on-centos-its-time-to-open-source-everything/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ahQ75...
jhowell 6y ago
I think the problem is more related to the skilleset of the blog owner, which may not necessarily be in devops but instead economics or journalism or other (tough to say without being able to acess the content). It's a feature not a bug that we all have different skills. I certainly do not want to discourage others from sharing their opinions due to technical issues that could be resolved more easily by developers (through their implementation and documentation) as much if not more than end users in a given situation.
- pepemon 6y ago
  Yeah, adding a little bit of caching (at least as WordPress plugin without dependencies for external entities) is now the DevOps problem that requires the DevOps solution, nice. Well, I mean, you can front the blog with Cloudflare using their wizard for free without any technical knowledge. What kind of DevOps magic do you need there?
  - menacingly 6y ago
    You I guess need the knowledge that you need to do that.
  - jhowell 6y ago
    Maybe changing the default settings based on user experience, or the implementation of a caching layer of some sort for infrequently changing blogs posts (seems that could be the majority) or making the importance of these settings more accessible to the people who use them and aren't developers in layman's terms. I don't use WordPress or blog personally. I do imagine that this particular issue is causing the author of the post anxiety due to it's unforseen (to them) failure. I'd prefer the computer not discourage them.

dimitar 6y ago

I think the twitter posts are more straight to the point: https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1337062314357514251 https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1337062314357514251 I don't understand why RH don't just allow downloading RH for free like they used to. They tried to funnel non-enterprise types into Fedora - it obviously doesn't work for everyone. There always be an Amazon Linux, Oracle Linux, Scientific or CENTOS, which are not improving RHELs brand.

gtirloni 6y ago
At this point, there's little trust that RH wouldn't change the terms on a free RHEL offering at some point in the future.
dralley 6y ago
The announcement hinted that that was the plan, to expand the developer program to cover cases like dev/staging servers that don't need active support. Personal opinion: They shouldn't have announced anything until those plans were ready, it would save everyone a lot of headaches.

Demiurge 6y ago

Why not just create Red Hat Live or something less confusing and disruptive to existing users? Perhaps upsetting people and making the news is part of the goal.

garmaine 6y ago
More likely because CentOS was (viewed to be) displacing RHEL sales.
- Demiurge 6y ago
  Can they not foresee Rocky Linux or one of many existing alternative distros? It’s an inconvenience to switch, but I don’t see that working.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Long-lived forks are few and far between. RH might be betting on the fact that the ecosystem is effectively not as lively or motivated as it was in the ‘00s. In the worst case, they gain a few months while a solid alternative emerges, and a few years before it can match CentOS’s reputation. The strength of CentOS was its longevity, that made it a credible option for reliable long-term production deployment; it takes time to rebuild that level of trust from scratch, and people who have been burnt once will now be twice shy to go with a community project rather than paying RH.
  - flatiron 6y ago
    The script to switch from centos to rocky will only be replacing the repositories and a few branding packages (about a dozen) it won’t be a big deal.
acdha 6y ago
Almost everyone I knew who used CentOS was doing so because they were targeting RHEL but didn’t want to buy RHEL licenses for everything (e.g. run RHEL on production servers & CentOS everywhere else). If you didn’t want a close to RHEL experience, you’d likely go with Debian to get more packages and a truly open community. One way of looking at that is to see CentOS as a gateway into the RHEL world, and especially a way for people to get experience with it or test open source software on it. I think that viewpoint just lost out to the other one seeing every CentOS install at a company as lost revenue. That’s not entirely unfounded but I suspect it will produce less revenue and cost them more in network effects than they anticipated. Any open source project, for example, has just been told that they need pay to test Red Hat compatibility.

ryanmjacobs 6y ago

Aside, I really enjoy the stock image. Gotta love "<plist version="VIRUS"> front and center :)

arvindamirtaa 6y ago

Well, looks like HN broke the site.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Stallman was already right, we will never have freedom as long as we use closed sourced software. How can you believe in promises that cannot be validated ?

wrnr 6y ago
OSS is neither a sufficient nor necessary for freedom, let's stop pretending it does, for freedom sake.
- nip180 6y ago
  OSS is an important part of hardware ownership. If I cannot control the software running on my device do I really own the device? If I do not fully control the hardware and software of my devices my ability to participate in the Information Age is limited. OSS is an important aspect of being a free citizen in the Information Age.
  - tw25493606 6y ago
    > If I cannot control the software running on my device do I really own the device? I think that depends on what you mean by "control" and "really own". Recently folks were complaining that Apple is acting as a monopoly because you can't install a non-Safari browser. Of course they're still stuck installing from the app store. So, demand installing from outside the app store, and they're still stuck using iOS. Demand changing the OS, and they're still stuck using Broadcom chips and indirectly supporting the CCP. These are all degrees of control, with associated trade-offs. Being able to easily alter and recompile an application is just one degree of control. There are many others you still won't have until you can fabricate a device from raw materials. And even then maybe your government won't allow you to access the necessary designs and materials (enforced by men with guns). Ultimately, everything is a package deal, and there is really no such thing as "owning" nor "full control", there are just contracts. For example, no one "really owns" their home; they rent the land from the government and (for most folks) the bank. > my ability to participate in the Information Age is limited Indeed, because that system works for its own purposes, not for you. You must conform to it, not vice versa. [1] [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-society-and-its-future#toc17 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-societ...

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Maybe there's another perspective on RedHat's backtracking on CentOS I've not thought about before: that they feel like they do/pay all the hard work when AMZN and others just rebrand RH/CentOS, add their proprietary bits, and merely supply a VM (AMI) image. So they basically want to go after AWS, Azure, Google as customers; just like Google wanted those other cloud providers to contribute to k8s a year or two ago.

iKevinShah 6y ago
IANAL and do not have the exact understanding but wouldn't something like Redis's RSAL work in this case but for Cent OS and Cloud providers? Source : https://redislabs.com/redis-source-available-license https://redislabs.com/redis-source-available-license
- ghaff 6y ago
  You can't relicense a Linux distro to an incompatible (and not even actually open source) license.
dcolkitt 6y ago
That would be a pretty rich attitude of them to take if this case. It’s not like RHEL is developed from scratch. At least 90% of the products value is tied to the Linux kernel itself. The majority of which comes from development effort outside Red Hat. (How many customers would stay if IBM hypothetically kept the userland and swapped to an AIX kernel?)
- cat199 6y ago
  true for the components, but not for all of the low-level integration work needed to bundle/assemble these, and all of the development/integration of the installers, etc. there's a reason people use linux distros over building their own
  - pas 6y ago
    RHEL's only real value is the looong support cycle. (And CentOS was the gateway drug, and now probably someone at IBM, beancounter or VP of sales, or someone with an ideology about how to convert free users into paying customers thought that many current CentOS users will just buy RHEL if they really need RHEL7/8. And ... it's hard to think they won't. The "vendor lock-in" happened the moment they picked CentOS instead of Debian/Ubuntu.) The low-level integration is just as good in Debian/Ubuntu land too. Hell, Arch does it too pretty well. (There's an announcement list about manual updates, it's worth subscribing to even if you don't use arch[0], because usually the same change will percolate down on the grapevine and next releases of other distros will also change similarly.) [0] btw, I don't use arch

Brian_K_White 6y ago

The same problem (from the commercial distros point of view) exists for RedHat now, and anyone following the plan of this article. If the software you are trying to sell, is GPL, then anyone can do the same as CentOS at any time. The article suggests users will arrange into two groups, non-paying users of the develelopment version and paying customers of the production-class version. But the production version is still GPL and so anyone can get the production version for free any time they want. Your only option for getting out of that is not to use any GPL software in your super valuable commercial product. That is the GPL deal, which you don't have take. You can take it OR leave it. What RedHat seems to have forgotten was 2 things, which I'm sure they knew very well at some point: - Even non-paying users are more valuable to you as non-paying members of your ecosystem than members of any of your competitors. They are actually what keeps your ecosystem a defacto standard. It is incalculable how valuable it is to be a defacto standard for anything. - Those non-paying users were never and are never going to be paying customers no matter what else you do. Their use is not "lost revenue" because you were never going to get any revenue from them anyway. If they couldn't use your product for free, they'd just use someone else's product for free. There is no "convert them into paying customers". And there is also no "convert them into development version users" either because of see above re GPL. All it is is annoying for everyone, even bystanders, that they keep trying.

toyg 6y ago
> But the production version is still GPL and so anyone can get the production version for free any time they want. That's not correct. Anyone who is already a user can. If you restrict distribution of the binaries, you also restrict the amount of people who can get the sources. You cannot impose NDAs or the likes, but you can introduce some restrictions on their overall privileges going forward (i.e. you republish sources? No more patches or support for you - which is basically what RH does with their paying customers). RH could stop publishing sources entirely, if they really wanted to, and just provide them to paying customers on request. They don't do that because it's a nuclear option that would effectively push them out of the Linux ecosystem they've invested so much into dominating (RH is effectively the one company who can steer massive amounts of the Linux ecosystem on its own - as shown by systemd et al).
6y ago

T3RMINATED 6y ago

What a DUMMY -- closed source pays the bills son.

Simulacra 6y ago

Is the title supposed to be Chef or Chief?

_e 6y ago
That is what I thought as well then I immediately thought about how the people who make custom Android ROMs (and Windows PPC roms before that) are known as 'Chefs' because they are cooking together all of the different pieces that make their ROM unique. No different than someone cobbling together a linux distribution but Jonathan Carter, of Debian, isn't referred to as a Chef. The title should read though, "Cofounder of Chef on Centos being open source." Chef, like Puppet, is used to manage server configurations.
- Simulacra 6y ago
  AH, I stand corrected> Thank you.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

Open Source is not a magic solution. There are plenty of "open source" projects run by a corporation that are a shit-show because they put the corporations' interests first. Honestly, screw everyone that uses some annoying "Open Source unless you compete with me" license, or doesn't include non-corporate engineers on an oversight board for the project. I don't give a crap if your code is available if you never accept the PRs that I make, or never address the issues I raise. Often these issues stay open for years, and the reason why is almost always the corporation didn't want to fix them. Do they invite the community to provide a fix? Nope. Sure, I can make my own patch for a bug affecting me right now. But then I have to maintain that patch into perpetuity. At that point I'd rather just pay for a commercial proprietary product. So what was the point of the source being open?

jnwatson 6y ago

What failed with Fedora that RHEL couldn't use that as upstream? Wasn't that supposed to be where Centos Stream is going?

ghaff 6y ago
RHEL does use Fedora as an upstream but only to rebase major versions. And RHEL may also make different decisions about various components. For example, btfs is now the default file system for Fedora but not RHEL. CentOS Stream is much closer to RHEL. It's basically the ongoing post-CI builds.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Yep, Fedora is where all new and improved Linux software gets integrated, often being the first Linux distribution where it lands. Many projects (GCC, Gnome any likely others) synchronize their release timelines due to this. The end result is a a rather nice and lately also quite stable modern Linux distro one can use on a PC and other platforms (there is a IoT edition now, container image, Fedora based CoreOS and others). Then every ~3 years Red Hat takes a snapshot of a released Fedora version and basically "productizes" it into a new RHEL release. This means many things, such as cutting package dependencies quite a bit to only ship what the customers expect and what can be expected to be maintainable for the 10 years of support RHEL has. There could be also some "RHELification" when a package is expected to have different default behavior than in Fedora, but most of that is done by spec file macros these days, so RHEL-only RHELification patches are thankfully rare. Then after a given RHEL version GA, there are minor releases about twice a year. for RHEL 8 for example you have 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, etc. And this is where CentOS stream actually comes in - it's effectively the continuous RHEL release that makes the point releases possible. Packages are updated for the the next point release and land in CentOS stream, then when all is ready for the next point release of RHEL, it is cut from the properly QAed CentOS stream state, which then starts tracking the next minor release. This is actually quite an improvement for the usecase of software building on top of RHEL, as instead of getting only a big bunch of surprise twice a year, they can now track what will be in the next release and either adjust or report issues soon enough for them to be fixed before the next point release. I'm thinking this rather important fact what CentOS stream actually is got kinda "lost in translation" as you can see various things stated as facts about it that are wrong: "CentOS stream is between Fedora and RHEL" - well, no, it's the source of the next RHEL minor release & nothing goes directly from Fedora to a point release. "CentOS stream is less stable than RHEL/CentOS" - well, it's the next RHEL, nothing that does not pass the high RHEL standards is expected to land in it for obvious reasons.

holoway 6y ago

I’m Adam Jacob (the quoted person in Matt’s article). Happy to answer questions :)

boulos 6y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. What’s your take on the state of “run your own service, beat out the cloud providers”? Is there something particular you’d taken away from Chef “vs” AWS’s OpsWorks? The article waves this away a little too much for me: > Could someone take that upstream and create a competitive downstream competitor? Of course. But no one should be able to out-Yugabyte on their home turf. > Or take Redis Labs. The company has fiddled with licensing over the last few years...
- holoway 6y ago
  It’s working pretty well for everyone. OpsWorks revenue was smaller than Chef. It grew our pie. Elastic, Redis, Mongo - all far bigger businesses with AWS competitions with them, seeing big growth in their cloud businesses. Having AWS, Azure, or GCP validate your technology, product, and market is a huge win. Being the prime creator of the product puts you in a very advantageous position (new features, deep support, better user experience). Like the “normal” open source channel, you don’t collect all of the funnel. You do get a new channel (users of rival cloud providers) that operates at a disadvantage compared to your offering (at all but scale, and that’s not an impenetrable one). Those are well qualified users, accustomed to paying for the software. They’re great leads. Downstream competitors are net good for you. Yes, it means other people get some of the revenue. But some of those would never have used the software in the first place without that competitor, or wouldn’t be used to paying for it. The increase in usage more than makes up for it.
  - boulos 6y ago
    Thanks for the quick response! Let me clarify though. Each of Elastic, Redis (Labs) and Mongo (and many others) have put licenses in place to explicitly exclude people from taking their code and turn it into a service. I think that’s fine and their right, as much as making any propriety software (including source available) is someone’s option. But you seem to have a different view about upstream (fully open?) and downstream (scarcity) that I wanted to understand more clearly.

jrsj 6y ago

I know this is a little bit of a tangent but after all this I have no intention of using a Red Hat derivative again. Debian is fine and perfectly stable.