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I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Li

I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Linux succeed where CentOS "failed"? How would Rocky Linux get resources to sustain it?

marmaduke 5y ago
Didn’t it fail because RH chose so? C8 certainly works fine, if boring.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
  - Tsiklon 5y ago
    Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7. AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.
      - jacobr1 5y ago
        The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.
        mrweasel 5y ago
        They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money. So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
        sparc24 5y ago
        Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD. RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST. Just stop talking.
    - chessmango 5y ago
      Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important. > It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky. Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support. I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
  - mhitza 5y ago
    > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release. Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand. But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
    - pfranz 5y ago
      Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases 6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.
mjw1007 5y ago
Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then. It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.
beermonster 5y ago
> I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”. I wish Rocky Linux the same success!
- mrweasel 5y ago
  How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival. I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it. Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
  - orev 5y ago
    CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
    - dralley 5y ago
      MoviePass had a large number of subscribers. It's very easy to be successful if you're giving something away for free and ignore sustainability.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried. Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset. But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
    - mrweasel 5y ago
orev 5y ago
The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors. The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
- GNOMES 5y ago
  Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing! (Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
    - kodah 5y ago
      Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.
      - hollerith 5y ago
        If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.
        kodah 5y ago
        Fair enough
        mickotron 5y ago

marmaduke 5y ago

Didn’t it fail because RH chose so? C8 certainly works fine, if boring.

bombcar 5y ago
Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7. AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.
      - mrweasel 5y ago
        They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money. So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
        sparc24 5y ago
        Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD. RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST. Just stop talking.
  - chessmango 5y ago
    Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there
- kbenson 5y ago
  > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important. > It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky. Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support. I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
- mhitza 5y ago
  > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release. Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand. But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
  - pfranz 5y ago
    Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases 6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.

mjw1007 5y ago

Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then. It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.

beermonster 5y ago

> I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”. I wish Rocky Linux the same success!

mrweasel 5y ago
How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival. I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it. Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
- orev 5y ago
  CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
  - dralley 5y ago
    MoviePass had a large number of subscribers. It's very easy to be successful if you're giving something away for free and ignore sustainability.
- beermonster 5y ago
  CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried. Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset. But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
  - mrweasel 5y ago

orev 5y ago

The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors. The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.

GNOMES 5y ago
Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
- hollerith 5y ago
  Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing! (Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
  - kodah 5y ago
    Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.
    - hollerith 5y ago
      If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.
      - kodah 5y ago
        Fair enough
      - mickotron 5y ago