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Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. To me, open-source is about the open, transparent "culture" in which you commit to

Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. To me, open-source is about the open, transparent "culture" in which you commit to develop, not about putting things out there for free (as in free beer). Too many companies already benefiting from open-source packages (e.g., OpenCV) without giving anything back to the community.

martinky24 3y ago
"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  "Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.
  - randombits0 3y ago
    Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
    - RamblingCTO 3y ago
      Leave out the "cr" and I agree
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
    - monkeywork 3y ago
      because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs. I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        I don't think that's correct; AFAIK OEL has always pulled directly from RHEL sources. That is, they were a sibling, not a downstream of CentOS. I am open to the idea that CentOS was basically collateral damage as Red Hat attempted to block Oracle, but that's not the same thing.
        monkeywork 3y ago
        That's what I'm suggesting - the only way RHEL could block OEL is to also kill off CentOS as we knew it.
- dralley 3y ago
  >"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" There was 6 years in between those two events, and by all accounts CentOS got much better post-acquisition. There is no "just" here. Originally it was considered a good idea, and (years) later they changed their minds.
- jofla_net 3y ago
  Agree and wish there was something that could be done against such business practices, but it is indeed difficult to regulate. Over the years I became aware that the acquire-extinguish pattern was definitely not just a coincidence, specifically i remember disney bought up some 'IP' just to litigate against some adjacently-related online fan game in the UK in order to shut it down and 'acquire' its captives, over to a similar product they already owned. Sorry I looked for the exact reference but cant find. There are countless other stories if you look though. This all came full circle when I was 'enlightening' a young relative who had just finished business school, or rather she 'learned' me. Turns out this acquire/extinguish game is like a whole 100-level course in <pick-your-business-school-of-america>. Who knew.
bogwog 3y ago
> Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. RedHat has been making money for decades. The Centos rug pull was just a way to make more money at the expense of their users and the larger open source community. It is impossible to justify a rug pull. By definition, it is a hostile, one-sided, trust-destroying, and underhanded move.
- pksebben 3y ago
  I found it notable that the linked RHEL post had zero mention of the why of it. Seems like a glaring omission.
- op00to 3y ago
  Can you define a rug pull?
  - forkicks 3y ago
    Promising to support an OS for 10 years then cutting that support to just 2 out of the blue?
    - op00to 3y ago
      The question I’m trying to answer is who promised what, where was that published, and when was it published. If a squirrel promised me 10 years of support, that’s different than a CentOS maintainer making that same promise on the wiki.
      - jahlove 3y ago
        The 10 years of support on CentOS 8 was published on centos.org's wiki: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent... Red Hat's explanation was something along the lines that it was a wiki and not guaranteed to be accurate? I don't think editing was open to to people outside of the CentOS org.
nonameiguess 3y ago
Frankly, I think this kind of thinking is short-sighted quarterly corporate bullshit almost certainly done by IBM and Redhat itself would never have done it (and most of the people who were Redhat in those days left to work somewhere else). How many corporate environments the world over are running on Redhat, paid Redhat, because the engineers there came up in the Linux world learning free Redhat and were able to continue using CentOS at home or in their dev environments? That sort of cradle-to-grave brand identity with people who eventually become high-level decision-makers and money controllers is invaluable, but the value is also impossible to quantify, accountants never se it, and instead just see people trying to use all of their hard work for free. Yet somehow even Pablo Escobar understood this and threw away billions just giving money to poor people to keep cities on his side. I'm not even going to say IBM's basic business model of making shit that works, doing at least some complex things reliably and well back when that was very difficult, is invalid. But it is fundamentally different to Redhat's business model, which was simply cultivating a lifelong love of their product in the minds of its users. It's like the Army acquiring the Red Cross. They work in a lot of the same places doing overlapping work and no doubt a lot of corporate synergy could be achieved and administrative overhead eliminated, but it would irreparably destroy a century and a half of goodwill and brand identity. Exactly the kind of strategy you'd expect from people whose decision consequence horizon extends no further than the next three reporting periods.

martinky24 3y ago

"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.

behnamoh 3y ago
"Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.
- randombits0 3y ago
  Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Leave out the "cr" and I agree
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
  - monkeywork 3y ago
    because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs. I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      I don't think that's correct; AFAIK OEL has always pulled directly from RHEL sources. That is, they were a sibling, not a downstream of CentOS. I am open to the idea that CentOS was basically collateral damage as Red Hat attempted to block Oracle, but that's not the same thing.
      - monkeywork 3y ago
        That's what I'm suggesting - the only way RHEL could block OEL is to also kill off CentOS as we knew it.
dralley 3y ago
>"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" There was 6 years in between those two events, and by all accounts CentOS got much better post-acquisition. There is no "just" here. Originally it was considered a good idea, and (years) later they changed their minds.
jofla_net 3y ago
Agree and wish there was something that could be done against such business practices, but it is indeed difficult to regulate. Over the years I became aware that the acquire-extinguish pattern was definitely not just a coincidence, specifically i remember disney bought up some 'IP' just to litigate against some adjacently-related online fan game in the UK in order to shut it down and 'acquire' its captives, over to a similar product they already owned. Sorry I looked for the exact reference but cant find. There are countless other stories if you look though. This all came full circle when I was 'enlightening' a young relative who had just finished business school, or rather she 'learned' me. Turns out this acquire/extinguish game is like a whole 100-level course in <pick-your-business-school-of-america>. Who knew.

bogwog 3y ago

> Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. RedHat has been making money for decades. The Centos rug pull was just a way to make more money at the expense of their users and the larger open source community. It is impossible to justify a rug pull. By definition, it is a hostile, one-sided, trust-destroying, and underhanded move.

pksebben 3y ago
I found it notable that the linked RHEL post had zero mention of the why of it. Seems like a glaring omission.
op00to 3y ago
Can you define a rug pull?
- forkicks 3y ago
  Promising to support an OS for 10 years then cutting that support to just 2 out of the blue?
  - op00to 3y ago
    The question I’m trying to answer is who promised what, where was that published, and when was it published. If a squirrel promised me 10 years of support, that’s different than a CentOS maintainer making that same promise on the wiki.
    - jahlove 3y ago
      The 10 years of support on CentOS 8 was published on centos.org's wiki: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent... Red Hat's explanation was something along the lines that it was a wiki and not guaranteed to be accurate? I don't think editing was open to to people outside of the CentOS org.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Frankly, I think this kind of thinking is short-sighted quarterly corporate bullshit almost certainly done by IBM and Redhat itself would never have done it (and most of the people who were Redhat in those days left to work somewhere else). How many corporate environments the world over are running on Redhat, paid Redhat, because the engineers there came up in the Linux world learning free Redhat and were able to continue using CentOS at home or in their dev environments? That sort of cradle-to-grave brand identity with people who eventually become high-level decision-makers and money controllers is invaluable, but the value is also impossible to quantify, accountants never se it, and instead just see people trying to use all of their hard work for free. Yet somehow even Pablo Escobar understood this and threw away billions just giving money to poor people to keep cities on his side. I'm not even going to say IBM's basic business model of making shit that works, doing at least some complex things reliably and well back when that was very difficult, is invalid. But it is fundamentally different to Redhat's business model, which was simply cultivating a lifelong love of their product in the minds of its users. It's like the Army acquiring the Red Cross. They work in a lot of the same places doing overlapping work and no doubt a lot of corporate synergy could be achieved and administrative overhead eliminated, but it would irreparably destroy a century and a half of goodwill and brand identity. Exactly the kind of strategy you'd expect from people whose decision consequence horizon extends no further than the next three reporting periods.