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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/15/2020 11:02 AM, Mike McGrath
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at
12:30 PM Phelps, Matthew <<a
href="mailto:mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu"
moz-do-not-send="true">mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu</a>>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Dec 15, 2020
at 1:00 PM Mike McGrath <<a
href="mailto:mmcgrath@redhat.com" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">mmcgrath@redhat.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
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<div>I'd also just add that while I find Johnny's
characterization of what happened accurate,
Ljubomir took a couple of leaps that I don't
think existed. Red Hat decided not to continue
paying actual money for what was actively
harming us and no longer providing the value
that it once did. No one, not even the board,
could force Red Hat to continue paying for this
project which was just not working for us. </div>
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<div>Thanks for admitting that the reason Red Hat did
this was financial. This BS about it being "a better
way for Community input into RHEL" is just that, BS.</div>
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<div>Ah, actually I didn't do that. RHEL is and has been
doing fine. Don't confuse "value" with revenue. CentOS
Linux no longer served any purpose at Red Hat and I'll
flip it back around as I did in the previous email.</div>
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<div>Why should Red Hat, or any company, continue to pay for
something that isn't working out?</div>
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<p>If RedHat needed to justify or clarify the investment it was
making in CentOS -- as a reminder: *after* taking the independent
project under its wing and letting others snuff themselves out as
superfluous -- then the professional thing to do would have been
to go to the larger community about it. <br>
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<p>Present options, such as the rebuild being spun back out. Or
discuss mechanisms for increasing CentOS->RHEL conversions. Or
solicit direct funding options to get free-riders to contribute
directly to CentOS Project expenses while still keeping a firewall
in place.<br>
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<div>Can we stop with the charade that this is supposed
to be a good thing for the CentOS community? It's not.
It was never intended to be. It's a punishment for us
getting "free Red Hat" all these years.</div>
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<div>I don't think anyone's said that. This is a massive
change and disruption for the existing CentOS community.
90% of the community (by our estimates) will be able to stay
on CentOS 7 until 2024 just as they expected. We made sure
the 10% on CentOS Linux 8 didn't continue to grow (thus
trying to minimize impact). We aren't punishing anyone and
the fact that two other clones have already popped up is a
testament to that.</div>
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<p>No, the fact that two other clones have popped up is a testament
to OSS communities' ability to cope with events. The unexpected
churn from having the distro pulled out is absolutely a punishment
because it creates a great deal of work for all of us to return to
the operational status quo with no real benefit.<br>
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<p><b>Direct question: If the CentOS Project (via the Board),
secures funding for expenses relating to the rebuild, does it
get to continue CentOS Linux?</b><b><br>
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<div>Well, you all see the reaction this has garnered
around the world, and it's all negative except for the
Red Hat employees trying to convince us it's a good
thing. Nice try.</div>
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<div>Actually, things took an interesting turn around
Thursday. Once people understood what we actually announced
much of the press has been very positive, and now that the
shock has worn off, we're seeing quite a lot of support.</div>
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<p>"What you actually announced" was that CentOS+CR was going to be
used internally for testing against future minor releases, and
that any ideal of a binary-compatible rebuild was going away.</p>
<p>I'm sure there's support from internal RH teams that for some
reason didn't have access to internal RHEL minor release betas. I
can't imagine who else this benefits in any way shape or form
(except Oracle, Amazon, and promoters of Debian-derived
distributions).<br>
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<p>"RedHat EL Stream" is a useful thing, and whether that's a
Preview (post-QA), a Beta (intra-QA), or Rawhide (pre-QA), there's
a place for it as an official way to provide feedback. But it's
entirely orthogonal from the "North American Enterprise Linux
Vendor" rebuild project.</p>
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<div>We all know differently. And we are all now making
influential choices that will hurt Red Hat. </div>
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<div>I don't mean to sound cold here but if you really want to
talk about the business side of this.... If you don't have
a budget and don't end up finding a home in our coming
low-cost or free offerings (Fedora, CentOS Stream, UBI, or
RHEL for developers, CI, Open Source, edu, mom/pop shops,
etc). Then what choices are you talking about?</div>
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<p>Anyone even tangentally associated with OSS is aware of the free
rider problem. As written above, there were plenty of ways to
approach this without forcing CentOS Linux to be canned
prematurely in the middle of a major release support cycle,
immediately after EL6 had gone EOL, and after RedHat's entry had
seemingly removed the need for other projects to continue
operations. Frankly, the lack of goodwill demonstrated here places
both "free" RHEL and UBI into suspect categories.</p>
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<p>-jc<br>
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