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It was indirectly about money in that CentOS was negative money. RH got nothing back for the time/money it was investing in CentOS. Of course, why they acquired

It was indirectly about money in that CentOS was negative money. RH got nothing back for the time/money it was investing in CentOS. Of course, why they acquired CentOS in the first place is equally puzzling as this outcome was predictable even back then.

antihero 4y ago
I reckon it’s mindshare - if you give people CentOS for personal and SME use, then those ops people will drive the choice of RHEL in larger companies.
johannes1234321 4y ago
Well, they get back that people stay in the RHEL universe isntead of Ubuntu etc. How that all plays out in the long term is of course hard to predict.
bonzini 4y ago
All Red Hat products layered on top of RHEL have an upstream distribution that used to be layered on CentOS (RDO for OpenShift, OKD for OpenShift, oVirt for RHV). CentOS was acquihired because it had serious sustainability issues and releases had sometimes been delayed by many months over RHEL. Red Hat couldn't base those upstream projects on a distro that could stop producing releases any time. It was a platform, it didn't have to bring money just like the people who manage a kubernetes cluster don't bring money (the money is brought by those that write the software that runs on said cluster). The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS. It would basically be a waterfall model, with a huge fixed delay in the critical path before things could be developed and tested. Hence the "left shift" that is CentOS Stream, where OKD and friends can develop on the next minor release of RHEL instead of the last one. Personally over the past year I have migrated a few CentOS 7 machines to CentOS Stream 9 and found it very stable. But if people want to use Alma, Red Hat won't complain.
- bubblethink 4y ago
  >The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS But this is RH's doing, right ? RH controls the delays since they own both RHEL and CentOS. So now CentOS stream doesn't have delays, but why couldn't the same process be applied to CentOS ? Is the argument that shipping a RHEL binary compatible clone suffers from delays, but shipping something not compatible doesn't ? This seems like a business decision more than a technical one.

antihero 4y ago

I reckon it’s mindshare - if you give people CentOS for personal and SME use, then those ops people will drive the choice of RHEL in larger companies.

johannes1234321 4y ago

Well, they get back that people stay in the RHEL universe isntead of Ubuntu etc. How that all plays out in the long term is of course hard to predict.

bonzini 4y ago

All Red Hat products layered on top of RHEL have an upstream distribution that used to be layered on CentOS (RDO for OpenShift, OKD for OpenShift, oVirt for RHV). CentOS was acquihired because it had serious sustainability issues and releases had sometimes been delayed by many months over RHEL. Red Hat couldn't base those upstream projects on a distro that could stop producing releases any time. It was a platform, it didn't have to bring money just like the people who manage a kubernetes cluster don't bring money (the money is brought by those that write the software that runs on said cluster). The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS. It would basically be a waterfall model, with a huge fixed delay in the critical path before things could be developed and tested. Hence the "left shift" that is CentOS Stream, where OKD and friends can develop on the next minor release of RHEL instead of the last one. Personally over the past year I have migrated a few CentOS 7 machines to CentOS Stream 9 and found it very stable. But if people want to use Alma, Red Hat won't complain.

bubblethink 4y ago
>The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS But this is RH's doing, right ? RH controls the delays since they own both RHEL and CentOS. So now CentOS stream doesn't have delays, but why couldn't the same process be applied to CentOS ? Is the argument that shipping a RHEL binary compatible clone suffers from delays, but shipping something not compatible doesn't ? This seems like a business decision more than a technical one.