5 ms·

Red hat set their user base on fire with their centos debacle whether they admit it or not.

by ikiris 5y ago

da_chicken 5y ago
Look, IBM has to start navigating that product into a mountainside at some point. It's always best to start with user goodwill so the knowledgeable individuals start bailing out. They have to get the number of experts down to a level where IBM has most of them under contract to their customers. That way in 20 years they can cease real support and development while still getting millions in annual revenue.
- hughrr 5y ago
  This is sickeningly accurate and hurt to read.
- nix23 5y ago
  This is probably the first time in history where Oracle is the nice guy here ;)
rleigh 5y ago
I personally ended all my projects' support for RHEL and CentOS a few weeks after that went down. They were already a massive pain in the ass to support, and had a smaller userbase than other Linux distributions (<10% for RHEL and CentOS combined is typical). For me, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. I don't really think that IBM/RedHat really saw CentOS as a gateway to RHEL, but as a source of lost sales. I think CentOS had great indirect value to them. It let people like me create, test and support software on RHEL without having RHEL licences. I neither want nor need them, nor could I justify them in the absence of paying customers to underwrite the cost. CentOS gets used for test environments, home use, self-supporting commercial use etc. I don't think many of those would really result in conversions to paying RHEL subscriptions. But they do serve to introduce people to the RHEL ecosystem. Maybe the strategy makes commercial sense. I don't know, or particularly care. But as an exercise in destroying a community which provided the extended support and software ecosystem around your core product, I think that was a strategic blunder. There are an awful lot of people who now won't be recommending RHEL to their customers, and the willingness of third-parties to test and support their software on RHEL has taken a hit, and that in turn reduces the value of using RHEL.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Where I work we had an enterprise RHEL license but it got too expensive. So I converted all our systems to CentOS. Then CentOS went away, not doing it again. We're moving to Ubuntu.
thedracle 5y ago
The original debacle was splitting off their non enterprise users to Fedora. It set me on the path of experimenting with Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu. Redhat has some excellent engineers, and I have made heavy use in the past of eCos in particular for embedded systems --- I've never understood why they continue to make grand decisions that alienate their customers.
- petre 5y ago
  You should really try openSuSE if you were using CentOS. Only 18 months of support but it's quite good. We are using that and Debian, and Ubuntu 18 on the dev machines but will also switch those to Debian, since Ubuntu 20 is quite annoying with snaps, cloud config and all that crap.
  - nix23 5y ago
    +10 for openSUSE Leap, it's a fantastic System, and for long running stuff (like Oracle DB's etc) buy one SLES (10y support) License, for everything else openSUSE leap (up to date apps, performance and compatibility)

Red hat set their user base on fire with their centos debacle whether they admit it or not.

by ikiris 5y ago

Red hat set their user base on fire with their centos debacle whether they admit it or not.

Look, IBM has to start navigating that product into a mountainside at some point. It's always best to start with user goodwill so the knowledgeable individuals start bailing out. They have to get the number of experts down to a level where IBM has most of them under contract to their customers. That way in 20 years they can cease real support and development while still getting millions in annual revenue.

hughrr 5y ago
This is sickeningly accurate and hurt to read.
nix23 5y ago
This is probably the first time in history where Oracle is the nice guy here ;)

rleigh 5y ago

I personally ended all my projects' support for RHEL and CentOS a few weeks after that went down. They were already a massive pain in the ass to support, and had a smaller userbase than other Linux distributions (<10% for RHEL and CentOS combined is typical). For me, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. I don't really think that IBM/RedHat really saw CentOS as a gateway to RHEL, but as a source of lost sales. I think CentOS had great indirect value to them. It let people like me create, test and support software on RHEL without having RHEL licences. I neither want nor need them, nor could I justify them in the absence of paying customers to underwrite the cost. CentOS gets used for test environments, home use, self-supporting commercial use etc. I don't think many of those would really result in conversions to paying RHEL subscriptions. But they do serve to introduce people to the RHEL ecosystem. Maybe the strategy makes commercial sense. I don't know, or particularly care. But as an exercise in destroying a community which provided the extended support and software ecosystem around your core product, I think that was a strategic blunder. There are an awful lot of people who now won't be recommending RHEL to their customers, and the willingness of third-parties to test and support their software on RHEL has taken a hit, and that in turn reduces the value of using RHEL.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Where I work we had an enterprise RHEL license but it got too expensive. So I converted all our systems to CentOS. Then CentOS went away, not doing it again. We're moving to Ubuntu.

thedracle 5y ago

The original debacle was splitting off their non enterprise users to Fedora. It set me on the path of experimenting with Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu. Redhat has some excellent engineers, and I have made heavy use in the past of eCos in particular for embedded systems --- I've never understood why they continue to make grand decisions that alienate their customers.

petre 5y ago
You should really try openSuSE if you were using CentOS. Only 18 months of support but it's quite good. We are using that and Debian, and Ubuntu 18 on the dev machines but will also switch those to Debian, since Ubuntu 20 is quite annoying with snaps, cloud config and all that crap.
- nix23 5y ago
  +10 for openSUSE Leap, it's a fantastic System, and for long running stuff (like Oracle DB's etc) buy one SLES (10y support) License, for everything else openSUSE leap (up to date apps, performance and compatibility)