3 ms·

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.

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.