9 ms·

CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

123 points by samizdis 6y ago

Daho0n 6y ago
So, we finally see IBM showing its ugly face. No more CentOS.
- naringas 6y ago
  they have no face, just a series of rules, methods, procedures,..etc. in all, a culture desgined by multiple generations of firm executives optimized to make profit in any way they can.
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    Well, they are a for profit company.
    - naringas 6y ago
      I'm only trying to say what they really are. it would be unfair to judge them only based on what they are. then again, I see open source slowly but steadily losing ground. and if open source has a tough time. free software has it even worse.
      - z29LiTp5qUC30n 6y ago
        The Free Software community is having a Renaissance right now and making advances on nearly every front. Turns out not compromising your principals and being zealots works.
        dralley 6y ago
        Free software is doing well, yes. Businesses built-around free software, not so much. The list of successful companies based on fully FOSS software can practically be counted on one hand. Most of the time, the product may be very successful, but the company is really struggling. A lot of OSS development is now done by companies who don't care that much about the software, because their revenue is totally independent. Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, etc. Or it's open-core like Redis and Gitlab, with paid proprietary bits. Or "open source" with anti-service-provider licenses like MongoDB, Elastic, Redis.
        jabl 6y ago
        Wait, what have I missed? I thought copyleft licensing has been steadily losing share to permissive licensing for a long time, with no end in sight. Can you point to information indicating otherwise? The Linux kernel itself keeps going from success to success, but that seems to be the last major copyleft bastion, and they also somewhat famously rejected GPLv3.
        beermonster 6y ago
        I think this is true, with the MIT license being the most popular. From Linus[1] on the topic of GPLv3, he chose GPLv2 as it was the best choice for doing kernel development - giving code and getting code back in return. One of his gripes about GPLv3, IIRC, was the 'Tivoization'[2] additions. He felt it was going too far the other way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
        ghaff 6y ago
        Furthermore, unlike many other projects, Linux is not licensed GPLv2 or later and doesn't have copyright assignment. This makes changing the license unilaterally at least problematic. Not necessarily impossible but, at least some would argue the permission of all the contributors would be required which would be basically impossible.
        beermonster 6y ago
        Yes, Linus himself mentioned they'd all need to be contacted and agree. He also said he saw the GPLv3 draft and so it was an early and conscious decision to not have a 'GPLv2 or later' license.
        ghaff 6y ago
        There were differences of opinion at the time. Eben Moglen said something to the effect that it could probably be relicensed on the theory that its history suggested it could be treated as a collective work. But it would have been controversial and Linus didn't want to anyway so discussions never went further than that. Here's something I wrote at the time: https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-not-a-legal-one/ https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-...
- m4r71n 6y ago
  Why are people assuming this is in any way IBM's doing? I know it's easy to say "IBM bad" but everything that has been said so far indicates this was a joint decision between Red Hat engineering and the CentOS project board members. The cognitive dissonance in assuming every acquisition of a smaller company by a bigger one immediately results in the collapse of said small company is unreal.
  - luma 6y ago
    It's not small versus big, Red Hat was a $34B acquisition. It's big and bigger. People are pointing at IBM because this is 100% the predictable consequence of a company like IBM purchasing an open source software organization. Open source isn't in their business model, so of course this was going to happen.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >Open source isn't in their business model There's a very good possibility that Linux wouldn't have had the impact that it has had absent IBM's investments in the early 2000s. It's not an "open source company" but it has significant investments in open source.
      - luma 6y ago
        IBM of 2020 isn't the IBM of 2000. I'll look at their actions, not their words.
  - raesene9 6y ago
    Whilst I'm not sure that there is strong evidence for this being related to the IBM acquisition, the idea of "blue wash" where acquired products have their licensing changed to fit in with IBM's way of doing things is so common that there's even an IBM web page about it https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/what-blue-wash https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/what-blue-wash. To quote that page "Once customers upgrade to IBM?s product it is often too late to negotiate and avoid hefty licensing charges associated with changed licensing metrics? "
- cheph 6y ago
  Except of course CentOS stream.
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Sad! It takes years of rock solidness to make a name in Linux for reliability, and basically one stupid decision to destroy a reputation. CentOS brought people in to the EcoSystem as an alternative to Debian Based distros and that is sadly no more.
1996 6y ago
Personally, I'm very happy the new RedHat showed their true colors so fast: it helped me decide to leave their ecosystem. EDIT: added "the new" to qualify the statement about RedHat, as indeed it's IBM at play. No amount of "kernel support" is worth the trouble of dealing with them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- turminal 6y ago
  Choices are though if you want to leave the RedHat ecosystem. Sure you can leave CentOS for Debian or Fedora for Ubuntu, but the entire Linux ecosystem is gradually becoming RedHat ecosystem.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Which kind of proves the point how hard it is to make any money out of FOSS when software is the product.
    - turminal 6y ago
      You mean, if there were other successful companies other than RedHat, the ecosystem would be more diverse?
      - dralley 6y ago
        SUSE is successful too, just small. Canonical has a wide audience but they've been unable to actually translate that into a self-sustaining business. They're lucky that Mark Shuttleworth is committed guy and not too attached to his stacks of money.
        1996 6y ago
        I see Ubuntu future in the hands of Microsoft!
        6y ago
cpach 6y ago
An alternative distro is being developed here: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/
- gibs0ns 6y ago
  Unfortunate name. To say something is rocky, is like saying it's unstable/unreliable.
  - _joel 6y ago
    Why, are the Rocky Mountains about to collapse? Also this is a sentimental name, chosen well imho. > "Thinking back to early CentOS days... My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you...Rocky Linux"
    - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
      > uncertain and difficult and not likely to last long > difficult or uncertain > unable to balance very well https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rocky https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rocky The parent to your comment is correct, as are you about the specific reference in this case. The etymology of the Rocky Mountains is unrelated to either: > The Rocky Mountains were so called by 1802, translating French Montagnes Rocheuses, first applied to the Canadian Rockies. "The name is not directly self-descriptive but is an approximate translation of the name of the former Native American people here known as the Assiniboin .... The mountains are in fact not noticeably rocky" https://www.etymonline.com/word/rocky https://www.etymonline.com/word/rocky
    - HunterWare 6y ago
      No, it's because rocky shores were very hazardous to shipping, and a ship "on the rocks" was either close to, or in, immediate peril. The homage seems lovely, but doesn't (unfortunately) change the fact that to the vast majority of english speakers "rocky" means unstable/dangerous... In fact, one of the most common expressions referring to an unstable/bad relationship is "their relationship is on the rocks" or "they are on the rocks".
Frost1x 6y ago
Large corporation undermines a group of people to make a buck, news at 11... Businesses aren't your friends, repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your goals. A business exists to make money and wealth for someone or some people. If that's not you, then they're not there to help you. I should point out that there are classes of businesses that do exist somewhat as an exception, certain charities and non-profits, but those aren't representative of the vast majority. Even they often aren't necessarily there to help you per se.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. Be wary of either group selling them as such.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. No, but its a helpful fiction as far as it makes everyone more convivial and agreeable. It forms a kind of shared illusion, not unlike the kayfabe of professional wrestling.
    - rob74 6y ago
      Yeah, you should be wary of trusting your employer too much, but if you go through your (professional) life with an attitude of "don't turn your back on anyone, they're all out to get you" the quote above will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy...
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    This isn’t untrue but it’s also an absolutist statement. There is a big difference between Canonical and Oracle, between Zappos (before Amazon bought them) and Walmart, between Starbucks and McDonalds. Your experience working for these will be vastly different. Your experience dealing with them will be also different. And some will behave closer to “good citizens” than others.
forgingahead 6y ago
Pity it's come to this - remember this (and other) fawning coverage? https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-the-first-billion-doll...
yakattak 6y ago
My previous employer went all in on ditching their RHEL boxes for CentOS. I wonder how that change is treating them now. Given this change by Red Hat/IBM, was it wasted effort? I wonder if they’ll now switch back to RHEL.
- cube00 6y ago
  All the devs can chip in and contribute their 16 production server allocation each.
- bombcar 6y ago
  And we wonder why Red Hat would do this. I think it's for this right here. CentOS was TOO GOOD after so long; even C-level execs were happy to sign off on using it.
- linsomniac 6y ago
  I used to provide a dedicated server to the Fedora project, and configured it for them to use. The conversation went something like this: "I assume you would like RHEL on it?" "Yep." "Can you get us a license, so we can install it?" "Sure thing, not a problem." A few days later. "Can you just install CentOS?" This was quite a few years ago.
daptaq 6y ago
If this can happen to CentOS, do we have to fear a comparable fate for Fedora? I've been using it for the last year, and it has been a nice change, but I wouldn't want it to die out because of strategy decisions. On the other hand, Fedora and RHEL don't seem to be in direct competition.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Anything can die - even Debian (!!) could die or be taken over given enough changes. But some are much more likely than others, and choosing which to base yourself on is a form a risk decision; perhaps a minor one.
- jgilias 6y ago
  I don't think so. The important difference being that CentOS is/was downstream of RHEL. So, repacked RHEL to remove the branding, but otherwise exactly the same. This obviously competes with RHEL directly if you feel like you're able and willing to support the system on your own. On the other hand, Fedora is upstream of RHEL. So, it serves an important role as a testing ground for stuff that may or may not end up in RHEL later down the line. I'm pretty sure you're safe, as it actually fills an essential role that is useful to Red Hat and that is very unlikely to eat into their main business.
- daxelrod 6y ago
  Fedora is strategically useful to Red Hat as an upstream of CentOS Stream, which is now an upstream of RHEL. As long as that remains the case, I wouldn’t expect them to pull funding.
boyadjian 6y ago
In the company where I work, we pay for Windows equipped machines (The Windows license is included in the sale price), but pay nothing for CentOS equipped machines. I can understand, why Red Hat wanted to stop that.
- cheph 6y ago
  Will CentOS stream not be feasible for them? They can always look at No-cost RHEL for small production workloads and No-cost RHEL for customer development teams (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...)
cube00 6y ago
> CentOS is a sponsored project, we are the funding agent and we happen to also be a heavy contributor. It would be interesting if there was a way to determine if any other open source projects have this kind of large dependency on a single company. Track GitHub accounts doing the commits which are linked to orgs perhaps?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yes, you can look at commits. The short answer is that the vast majority of open source projects are to a large degree dependent on a single person or company. (And those without corporate funding can have trouble--as did CentOS at one or more points in its history before Red Hat picked up the funding.) ADDED: Although major successful projects do tend to have a more diverse community because that's what takes most advantage of the open source development model.
- whatever1 6y ago
  Open source is not free-of-charge to develop. Either a company is paying someone to contribute, or someone is dedicating voluntarily their own high-value time to contribute. Neither of the above is free.
bitlevel 6y ago
Debian Servers it is then.
proxycon 6y ago
interesting paragraph about the centos users, that most are anonymous who never call and never write. And if red hat is not trying to convert them to paying users, redhat doesnt get any value from them. Atleast now, with centos stream, these users will be sort of beta testers.
mirekrusin 6y ago
Smells like IBM-patrons decision to weed out plebs giving away for free "enterprise solution" they milk.
macksd 6y ago
>> "These are people who", the CentOS team said, "never called, never write, they don't interact with us." So the people for whom Red Hat provided no measurable value beyond the intrinsic value of what you downloaded. The copyright for which is largely owned by Not Red Hat, and thus they're bound by the GPL. Red Hat adds incremental value to those projects and organizes the distribution - they deserve to get paid for that, of course. But they were paid - they are the stick by which all other open source companies measure their commercial success. If you advertise being open source as a good thing, the ability to fork is a feature, not a bug. So the Rocky Linuxes of the world are inevitable and a good thing. Acquiring the CentOS project and then killing it is destroying a lot of community good will and I have no sympathy...
- ossusermivami 6y ago
  I agree with you _but_ i don't think CentOS would have survived if not for the redhat acquisition maybe they could have in some alternate way (perhaps rockylinux can achieve this?) but the cost of producing CentOS in that form was way too high if not for the contribution of Redhat, Unpopular opionion but i think Redhat probably just extended the lifespan of the centos distribution instead of killing it straight away. (I am saying that as someone who has donated to the rockylinux project)
  - macksd 6y ago
    Yeah I'm glad to see that Rocky Linux is being a little more upfront about donating and sponsoring, and that they already have some big sponsors. Granted, it was early in my career, but I don't remember CentOS soliciting support, and I had no idea they were struggling to cover costs until this comment. If it had occurred to me, I would have kicked them a few bucks (and probably convinced an employer or two to do something more substantial). I suppose the Internet makes CDs less useful, but I liked when more FOSS projects used to sell media and merchandise.
    - mst 6y ago
      My collection vanished in one of N house moves over the years but I basically used to buy media as merchandise - having a pretty branded CD on my shelf made me happy even if I wasn't ever really using it as install media.
cheph 6y ago
The title is a bit misleading IMO. > What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS. CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  Yes I was looking for someone to see it from my view. At least I assume we are on the same page here. What I see here is Redhat optimizing the release cycle. Please correct me if I'm wrong or my english is bad but it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream than the overhead that was each CentOS release. And in that process they gain a sort of dev branch of RedHat that people can use to get a distro as close as possible to what RedHat will be, but also beta testers.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream For many scenarios it does. It gives far more visibility into what's coming in future RHEL releases than a downstream rebuild of past point releases did. However, a lot of people are used to those backward looking point releases because "that's the way we've always done things."(tm) I also imagine that many of the same people think nothing of using cloud platforms and services that are getting changed many times a day--but those changes are invisible for the most part so it doesn't bother them. I'm not sure beta test is all that meaningful a term in a CI/CD world. Yes, there is final acceptance testing for official releases but a lot of software we use is basically changing all the time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  This is almost certainly underappreciated. A lot of software has moved away from long term support of point releases. Good luck getting one of the big cloud providers to commit to an unchanging point release of their platforms with backported security and major bug fixes. CentOS Stream is essentially RHEL nightlies that have gone through gating CI tests.
- 6y ago
mjw1007 6y ago
So, according to this article the Red Hat "liaison with the CentOS project" said: « we went to the CentOS project and said, here is a thing Red Hat is going to do. We believe there are consequences of this action... the end result was the decision that got made by the project » Something doesn't seem right, if CentOS is really a project capable of making its own decisions as he's trying to make it appear. If that was the case, I wouldn't expect that the first thing the public to hear about the change would be the announcement that CentOS-in-its-previous-form was being discontinued. I would expect to hear the board saying « Red Hat say they're no longer going to invest in CentOS in its current form. If nobody comes forward to invest with money or staff, we'll have to discontinue it. »
Ottolay 6y ago
I don't understand the heartburn people are having about this. If you want to use a free distro, why not just move to one of the many distributions which are not tied to a for profit company?
- beermonster 6y ago
  Which other distros are there which have 10 years support? It looks like there's only Oracle Linux left currently? That is like being caught between a rock and a hard place ;-)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    CentOS never had support. It only had "10 years of support" in the sense that it was a mostly compatible downstream rebuild of RHEL which does have long-term support for subscription customers.
    - beermonster 6y ago
      10 years of security updates/critical fixes. Which means you can set it up once, install your mail server or whatever, and have a solid and secure system for a very long time.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    If you're small, use RHEL developer license. If you're big, buy proper RHEL license.
vasergen 6y ago
Centos was my first touch with Linux in virtual machine in vagrant. It was kind of standart to use centos.
tyingq 6y ago
I feel for RedHat employees on the "Centos Stream" team. They are now working a product that is just a testing waystation between Fedora and RHEL, and will have no actual users.
amacbride 6y ago
“A lot of people would say support is 'can I just call someone', but support is also all of those updates and security fixes," he said.” Here’s the crux of it.
jmclnx 6y ago
This comment concerns me: "The next version will not be like Stream 8. "We have said publicly this is not the way it's going to be. Stream 9 is going to show you that code flows from Fedora to CentOS Stream" To me, this indicates Stream will be rather close to Fedora. Right now Stream seems rather stable. But that tells me Stream will be a rolling release of Fedora. Do others read it that way ?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Currently, Fedora is mostly used to rebase (only) major RHEL releases. I read the statement as a desire to flow Fedora innovations into RHEL via CentOS Stream more incrementally.
linsomniac 6y ago
CentOS has been a great project, I used to use the heck out of it. But one of the things I really like about Ubuntu is that their community and LTS releases are the Same. Exact. Thing. We know when we deploy something when we will have to get off it, and don't have to worry about unofficial maintainers.

123 points by samizdis 6y ago

Daho0n 6y ago

So, we finally see IBM showing its ugly face. No more CentOS.

naringas 6y ago
they have no face, just a series of rules, methods, procedures,..etc. in all, a culture desgined by multiple generations of firm executives optimized to make profit in any way they can.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  Well, they are a for profit company.
  - naringas 6y ago
    I'm only trying to say what they really are. it would be unfair to judge them only based on what they are. then again, I see open source slowly but steadily losing ground. and if open source has a tough time. free software has it even worse.
    - z29LiTp5qUC30n 6y ago
      The Free Software community is having a Renaissance right now and making advances on nearly every front. Turns out not compromising your principals and being zealots works.
      - dralley 6y ago
        Free software is doing well, yes. Businesses built-around free software, not so much. The list of successful companies based on fully FOSS software can practically be counted on one hand. Most of the time, the product may be very successful, but the company is really struggling. A lot of OSS development is now done by companies who don't care that much about the software, because their revenue is totally independent. Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, etc. Or it's open-core like Redis and Gitlab, with paid proprietary bits. Or "open source" with anti-service-provider licenses like MongoDB, Elastic, Redis.
      - jabl 6y ago
        Wait, what have I missed? I thought copyleft licensing has been steadily losing share to permissive licensing for a long time, with no end in sight. Can you point to information indicating otherwise? The Linux kernel itself keeps going from success to success, but that seems to be the last major copyleft bastion, and they also somewhat famously rejected GPLv3.
        beermonster 6y ago
        I think this is true, with the MIT license being the most popular. From Linus[1] on the topic of GPLv3, he chose GPLv2 as it was the best choice for doing kernel development - giving code and getting code back in return. One of his gripes about GPLv3, IIRC, was the 'Tivoization'[2] additions. He felt it was going too far the other way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
        ghaff 6y ago
        Furthermore, unlike many other projects, Linux is not licensed GPLv2 or later and doesn't have copyright assignment. This makes changing the license unilaterally at least problematic. Not necessarily impossible but, at least some would argue the permission of all the contributors would be required which would be basically impossible.
        beermonster 6y ago
        Yes, Linus himself mentioned they'd all need to be contacted and agree. He also said he saw the GPLv3 draft and so it was an early and conscious decision to not have a 'GPLv2 or later' license.
        ghaff 6y ago
        There were differences of opinion at the time. Eben Moglen said something to the effect that it could probably be relicensed on the theory that its history suggested it could be treated as a collective work. But it would have been controversial and Linus didn't want to anyway so discussions never went further than that. Here's something I wrote at the time: https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-not-a-legal-one/ https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-...
m4r71n 6y ago
Why are people assuming this is in any way IBM's doing? I know it's easy to say "IBM bad" but everything that has been said so far indicates this was a joint decision between Red Hat engineering and the CentOS project board members. The cognitive dissonance in assuming every acquisition of a smaller company by a bigger one immediately results in the collapse of said small company is unreal.
- luma 6y ago
  It's not small versus big, Red Hat was a $34B acquisition. It's big and bigger. People are pointing at IBM because this is 100% the predictable consequence of a company like IBM purchasing an open source software organization. Open source isn't in their business model, so of course this was going to happen.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >Open source isn't in their business model There's a very good possibility that Linux wouldn't have had the impact that it has had absent IBM's investments in the early 2000s. It's not an "open source company" but it has significant investments in open source.
    - luma 6y ago
      IBM of 2020 isn't the IBM of 2000. I'll look at their actions, not their words.
- raesene9 6y ago
  Whilst I'm not sure that there is strong evidence for this being related to the IBM acquisition, the idea of "blue wash" where acquired products have their licensing changed to fit in with IBM's way of doing things is so common that there's even an IBM web page about it https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/what-blue-wash https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/what-blue-wash. To quote that page "Once customers upgrade to IBM?s product it is often too late to negotiate and avoid hefty licensing charges associated with changed licensing metrics? "
cheph 6y ago
Except of course CentOS stream.

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

Sad! It takes years of rock solidness to make a name in Linux for reliability, and basically one stupid decision to destroy a reputation. CentOS brought people in to the EcoSystem as an alternative to Debian Based distros and that is sadly no more.

1996 6y ago

Personally, I'm very happy the new RedHat showed their true colors so fast: it helped me decide to leave their ecosystem. EDIT: added "the new" to qualify the statement about RedHat, as indeed it's IBM at play. No amount of "kernel support" is worth the trouble of dealing with them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
turminal 6y ago
Choices are though if you want to leave the RedHat ecosystem. Sure you can leave CentOS for Debian or Fedora for Ubuntu, but the entire Linux ecosystem is gradually becoming RedHat ecosystem.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Which kind of proves the point how hard it is to make any money out of FOSS when software is the product.
  - turminal 6y ago
    You mean, if there were other successful companies other than RedHat, the ecosystem would be more diverse?
    - dralley 6y ago
      SUSE is successful too, just small. Canonical has a wide audience but they've been unable to actually translate that into a self-sustaining business. They're lucky that Mark Shuttleworth is committed guy and not too attached to his stacks of money.
      - 1996 6y ago
        I see Ubuntu future in the hands of Microsoft!
      - 6y ago

cpach 6y ago

An alternative distro is being developed here: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/

gibs0ns 6y ago
Unfortunate name. To say something is rocky, is like saying it's unstable/unreliable.
- _joel 6y ago
  Why, are the Rocky Mountains about to collapse? Also this is a sentimental name, chosen well imho. > "Thinking back to early CentOS days... My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you...Rocky Linux"
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    > uncertain and difficult and not likely to last long > difficult or uncertain > unable to balance very well https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rocky https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rocky The parent to your comment is correct, as are you about the specific reference in this case. The etymology of the Rocky Mountains is unrelated to either: > The Rocky Mountains were so called by 1802, translating French Montagnes Rocheuses, first applied to the Canadian Rockies. "The name is not directly self-descriptive but is an approximate translation of the name of the former Native American people here known as the Assiniboin .... The mountains are in fact not noticeably rocky" https://www.etymonline.com/word/rocky https://www.etymonline.com/word/rocky
  - HunterWare 6y ago
    No, it's because rocky shores were very hazardous to shipping, and a ship "on the rocks" was either close to, or in, immediate peril. The homage seems lovely, but doesn't (unfortunately) change the fact that to the vast majority of english speakers "rocky" means unstable/dangerous... In fact, one of the most common expressions referring to an unstable/bad relationship is "their relationship is on the rocks" or "they are on the rocks".

Frost1x 6y ago

Large corporation undermines a group of people to make a buck, news at 11... Businesses aren't your friends, repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your goals. A business exists to make money and wealth for someone or some people. If that's not you, then they're not there to help you. I should point out that there are classes of businesses that do exist somewhat as an exception, certain charities and non-profits, but those aren't representative of the vast majority. Even they often aren't necessarily there to help you per se.

adamcstephens 6y ago
Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. Be wary of either group selling them as such.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. No, but its a helpful fiction as far as it makes everyone more convivial and agreeable. It forms a kind of shared illusion, not unlike the kayfabe of professional wrestling.
  - rob74 6y ago
    Yeah, you should be wary of trusting your employer too much, but if you go through your (professional) life with an attitude of "don't turn your back on anyone, they're all out to get you" the quote above will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy...
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  This isn’t untrue but it’s also an absolutist statement. There is a big difference between Canonical and Oracle, between Zappos (before Amazon bought them) and Walmart, between Starbucks and McDonalds. Your experience working for these will be vastly different. Your experience dealing with them will be also different. And some will behave closer to “good citizens” than others.

forgingahead 6y ago

Pity it's come to this - remember this (and other) fawning coverage? https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-the-first-billion-doll...

yakattak 6y ago

My previous employer went all in on ditching their RHEL boxes for CentOS. I wonder how that change is treating them now. Given this change by Red Hat/IBM, was it wasted effort? I wonder if they’ll now switch back to RHEL.

cube00 6y ago
All the devs can chip in and contribute their 16 production server allocation each.
bombcar 6y ago
And we wonder why Red Hat would do this. I think it's for this right here. CentOS was TOO GOOD after so long; even C-level execs were happy to sign off on using it.
linsomniac 6y ago
I used to provide a dedicated server to the Fedora project, and configured it for them to use. The conversation went something like this: "I assume you would like RHEL on it?" "Yep." "Can you get us a license, so we can install it?" "Sure thing, not a problem." A few days later. "Can you just install CentOS?" This was quite a few years ago.

daptaq 6y ago

If this can happen to CentOS, do we have to fear a comparable fate for Fedora? I've been using it for the last year, and it has been a nice change, but I wouldn't want it to die out because of strategy decisions. On the other hand, Fedora and RHEL don't seem to be in direct competition.

bombcar 6y ago
Anything can die - even Debian (!!) could die or be taken over given enough changes. But some are much more likely than others, and choosing which to base yourself on is a form a risk decision; perhaps a minor one.
jgilias 6y ago
I don't think so. The important difference being that CentOS is/was downstream of RHEL. So, repacked RHEL to remove the branding, but otherwise exactly the same. This obviously competes with RHEL directly if you feel like you're able and willing to support the system on your own. On the other hand, Fedora is upstream of RHEL. So, it serves an important role as a testing ground for stuff that may or may not end up in RHEL later down the line. I'm pretty sure you're safe, as it actually fills an essential role that is useful to Red Hat and that is very unlikely to eat into their main business.
daxelrod 6y ago
Fedora is strategically useful to Red Hat as an upstream of CentOS Stream, which is now an upstream of RHEL. As long as that remains the case, I wouldn’t expect them to pull funding.

boyadjian 6y ago

In the company where I work, we pay for Windows equipped machines (The Windows license is included in the sale price), but pay nothing for CentOS equipped machines. I can understand, why Red Hat wanted to stop that.

cheph 6y ago
Will CentOS stream not be feasible for them? They can always look at No-cost RHEL for small production workloads and No-cost RHEL for customer development teams (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...)

cube00 6y ago

> CentOS is a sponsored project, we are the funding agent and we happen to also be a heavy contributor. It would be interesting if there was a way to determine if any other open source projects have this kind of large dependency on a single company. Track GitHub accounts doing the commits which are linked to orgs perhaps?

ghaff 6y ago
Yes, you can look at commits. The short answer is that the vast majority of open source projects are to a large degree dependent on a single person or company. (And those without corporate funding can have trouble--as did CentOS at one or more points in its history before Red Hat picked up the funding.) ADDED: Although major successful projects do tend to have a more diverse community because that's what takes most advantage of the open source development model.
whatever1 6y ago
Open source is not free-of-charge to develop. Either a company is paying someone to contribute, or someone is dedicating voluntarily their own high-value time to contribute. Neither of the above is free.

bitlevel 6y ago

Debian Servers it is then.

proxycon 6y ago

interesting paragraph about the centos users, that most are anonymous who never call and never write. And if red hat is not trying to convert them to paying users, redhat doesnt get any value from them. Atleast now, with centos stream, these users will be sort of beta testers.

mirekrusin 6y ago

Smells like IBM-patrons decision to weed out plebs giving away for free "enterprise solution" they milk.

macksd 6y ago

>> "These are people who", the CentOS team said, "never called, never write, they don't interact with us." So the people for whom Red Hat provided no measurable value beyond the intrinsic value of what you downloaded. The copyright for which is largely owned by Not Red Hat, and thus they're bound by the GPL. Red Hat adds incremental value to those projects and organizes the distribution - they deserve to get paid for that, of course. But they were paid - they are the stick by which all other open source companies measure their commercial success. If you advertise being open source as a good thing, the ability to fork is a feature, not a bug. So the Rocky Linuxes of the world are inevitable and a good thing. Acquiring the CentOS project and then killing it is destroying a lot of community good will and I have no sympathy...

ossusermivami 6y ago
I agree with you _but_ i don't think CentOS would have survived if not for the redhat acquisition maybe they could have in some alternate way (perhaps rockylinux can achieve this?) but the cost of producing CentOS in that form was way too high if not for the contribution of Redhat, Unpopular opionion but i think Redhat probably just extended the lifespan of the centos distribution instead of killing it straight away. (I am saying that as someone who has donated to the rockylinux project)
- macksd 6y ago
  Yeah I'm glad to see that Rocky Linux is being a little more upfront about donating and sponsoring, and that they already have some big sponsors. Granted, it was early in my career, but I don't remember CentOS soliciting support, and I had no idea they were struggling to cover costs until this comment. If it had occurred to me, I would have kicked them a few bucks (and probably convinced an employer or two to do something more substantial). I suppose the Internet makes CDs less useful, but I liked when more FOSS projects used to sell media and merchandise.
  - mst 6y ago
    My collection vanished in one of N house moves over the years but I basically used to buy media as merchandise - having a pretty branded CD on my shelf made me happy even if I wasn't ever really using it as install media.

cheph 6y ago

The title is a bit misleading IMO. > What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS. CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing.

INTPenis 6y ago
Yes I was looking for someone to see it from my view. At least I assume we are on the same page here. What I see here is Redhat optimizing the release cycle. Please correct me if I'm wrong or my english is bad but it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream than the overhead that was each CentOS release. And in that process they gain a sort of dev branch of RedHat that people can use to get a distro as close as possible to what RedHat will be, but also beta testers.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream For many scenarios it does. It gives far more visibility into what's coming in future RHEL releases than a downstream rebuild of past point releases did. However, a lot of people are used to those backward looking point releases because "that's the way we've always done things."(tm) I also imagine that many of the same people think nothing of using cloud platforms and services that are getting changed many times a day--but those changes are invisible for the most part so it doesn't bother them. I'm not sure beta test is all that meaningful a term in a CI/CD world. Yes, there is final acceptance testing for official releases but a lot of software we use is basically changing all the time.
ghaff 6y ago
This is almost certainly underappreciated. A lot of software has moved away from long term support of point releases. Good luck getting one of the big cloud providers to commit to an unchanging point release of their platforms with backported security and major bug fixes. CentOS Stream is essentially RHEL nightlies that have gone through gating CI tests.
6y ago

mjw1007 6y ago

So, according to this article the Red Hat "liaison with the CentOS project" said: « we went to the CentOS project and said, here is a thing Red Hat is going to do. We believe there are consequences of this action... the end result was the decision that got made by the project » Something doesn't seem right, if CentOS is really a project capable of making its own decisions as he's trying to make it appear. If that was the case, I wouldn't expect that the first thing the public to hear about the change would be the announcement that CentOS-in-its-previous-form was being discontinued. I would expect to hear the board saying « Red Hat say they're no longer going to invest in CentOS in its current form. If nobody comes forward to invest with money or staff, we'll have to discontinue it. »

Ottolay 6y ago

I don't understand the heartburn people are having about this. If you want to use a free distro, why not just move to one of the many distributions which are not tied to a for profit company?

beermonster 6y ago
Which other distros are there which have 10 years support? It looks like there's only Oracle Linux left currently? That is like being caught between a rock and a hard place ;-)
- ghaff 6y ago
  CentOS never had support. It only had "10 years of support" in the sense that it was a mostly compatible downstream rebuild of RHEL which does have long-term support for subscription customers.
  - beermonster 6y ago
    10 years of security updates/critical fixes. Which means you can set it up once, install your mail server or whatever, and have a solid and secure system for a very long time.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  If you're small, use RHEL developer license. If you're big, buy proper RHEL license.

vasergen 6y ago

Centos was my first touch with Linux in virtual machine in vagrant. It was kind of standart to use centos.

tyingq 6y ago

I feel for RedHat employees on the "Centos Stream" team. They are now working a product that is just a testing waystation between Fedora and RHEL, and will have no actual users.

amacbride 6y ago

“A lot of people would say support is 'can I just call someone', but support is also all of those updates and security fixes," he said.” Here’s the crux of it.

jmclnx 6y ago

This comment concerns me: "The next version will not be like Stream 8. "We have said publicly this is not the way it's going to be. Stream 9 is going to show you that code flows from Fedora to CentOS Stream" To me, this indicates Stream will be rather close to Fedora. Right now Stream seems rather stable. But that tells me Stream will be a rolling release of Fedora. Do others read it that way ?

ghaff 6y ago
Currently, Fedora is mostly used to rebase (only) major RHEL releases. I read the statement as a desire to flow Fedora innovations into RHEL via CentOS Stream more incrementally.

linsomniac 6y ago

CentOS has been a great project, I used to use the heck out of it. But one of the things I really like about Ubuntu is that their community and LTS releases are the Same. Exact. Thing. We know when we deploy something when we will have to get off it, and don't have to worry about unofficial maintainers.