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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/17/2020 5:06 AM, Yedidyah Bar
David wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAHRwYXuxbuDmQYyx3-Mzr5=z58Sz0GmLWRHiOSrMP78eNj04sg@mail.gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Re the CentOS <span class="moz-txt-underscore"><span class="moz-txt-tag">_</span>brand<span class="moz-txt-tag">_</span></span>: People keep saying: OK, you realized that
taking over CentOS was a mistake. Fine. Just give it back to the
community. Now, let's have an exercise. Red Hat claims that CentOS
costs it money. A lot of money. And that if CentOS Linux would
continue as-is, even without Red Hat's financing, it would still
cost it quite a lot of money. See the linked article at start of
this thread, and other stuff here, for details. But it's not
important if you accept this fact as presented or not. Just accept
that this is Red Hat's stand - that CentOS Linux will continue
costing it money, as-is. Now, suppose that Red Hat, expecting the
huge noise/backlash such an announcement would cause, would simply
quitely try to find contributions somewhere and keep the project
as-is. Would this help covering these costs? Would a thread like
current exist? Would people seriously start thinking about what
it means to have something like CentOS Linux? How much it costs?
etc.? I do not think so. </pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAHRwYXuxbuDmQYyx3-Mzr5=z58Sz0GmLWRHiOSrMP78eNj04sg@mail.gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">So Red Hat decided it's best for
everyone to simply publicly kill it. To make it extremely clear
that Red Hat is not involved anymore in any RHEL rebuilds. That
from Red Hat's POV, if you want CentOS Stream, as presented, you
are most welcome to try it, that if you want RHEL, you have
several options for getting it, but that if you want a RHEL
rebuild, then CentOS isn't one, and Red Hat is not going to be
involved in one. That if anyone wants to make one, fine - but
Red Hat is not part of that. </pre>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this supposition undervalues the awareness of the folks
on this list, or who have been a part of this industry for a long
time.</p>
<p>RedHat is a for-profit company, borne from a foundation of
open-source. Most of the users are also for-profit companies of
one type or another. One for-profit company is not going to simply
"donate" to another one without some sort of return, even if it
isn't a great one. But everyone in the OSS community who's been
here for a while is well aware of the communal challenges around
free-ridership. The relationship between RHL/RHEL and rebuilds is
<u>not</u> the same relationship as between, say, software
companies and Amazon selling it as a service. As others have said
on this thread, they've worked hard to FIND WAYS to throw money at
RedHat to help ensure stability, development, and resources
continue, and RedHat itself has rebuffed them or been
non-responsive.<br>
</p>
<p>Had RedHat said "Real Talk: Running CentOS is expensive and we
need a better way to justify this or get support for non-revenue
operations more broadly", there are people on this list who would
have jumped. There are multi-billion dollar companies that prize
stability but could not internally justify a switch to all-RHEL
pricing, given that rebuilds operated with a level of risk that
was acceptable to them (or, more likely, acceptable to their
sysadmin and linux engineering teams). If you're paying 20-25
senior Linux engineers, moving from OSS to a commercial framework
is a tough sell. A common-good/private-profit synergy where
support contracts were paired with contributions earmarked for
CentOS operations and associated PR boosts would have been a
no-brainer, and that synergy was what was implied in 2014. The
expectation was that if your quasi-official rebuild project was in
danger of closing up, there would have been outreach. There
wasn't. This came out of the blue for anyone outside the bubble.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAHRwYXuxbuDmQYyx3-Mzr5=z58Sz0GmLWRHiOSrMP78eNj04sg@mail.gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">People on
this thread keep saying two opposite, contradicting things: One,
that CentOS, as a name, is worth almost nothing - say, not much
more than the cost of keeping the domain name centos.org, and
the other, that CentOS is a huge thing, and that killing it
as-is is a huge crime. Please be honest. If you think the former,
what's the problem? Just create a new cool name, and start
collecting people to join you. If you think the latter, please
realize that this costs money - a lot - and that Red Hat decided
that it does not want to spend this money anymore. I personally
think that's fair.</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>The fact that CentOS Linux was *not* spun off -- not allowed a
chance to solicit funding directly, years after the funding
problems from before -- but was, in fact "killed" is precisely the
sign that this was about RedHat punishing the rebuild userbase,
and not out of any sort of desire to maintain symbiosis with the
(much larger) EL-derivative community or develop further ways to
improve the balance sheets of both RHEL and the CentOS sides of
the house.</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Of course!
As other, more senior Red Hatters already said on this thread: Game on.
We do not look for mercy. We think we are good. If you prefer doing
business with Oracle, or CloudLinux, or a (new) company behind Rocky
Linux - go ahead.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
</pre>
<p>If CentOS needed a row of hardware to continue functioning (or it
would die), there would have been donations. But when a new
Vice-President comes on the list and throws it back at the
post-2014 not meeting expectations that clearly were not indicated
(and, in fact, were the polar opposite of what a downstream
support distribution is intended to be), you're seeing more and
more goodwill drying up.
The other EL-derivatives *also* didn't operate for-profit, and
closed down operations because they trusted that RH was doing the
right thing. Clearly that trust, that RH would be the grownups
here, was severely misplaced. EL-users have invested significant
time and energy in the RH ecosystem, and we don't really *need*
competing rebuild projects, which all, by definition, are trying
to do nearly identical things.</p>
<p>The direct revenue to RHEL is not changing overnight. No one on
this list *wants* to do business with Oracle, and no one wants to
be enemies with RedHat. But leadership has needlessly created a
hostile environment (not just a cool one, or a
post-amicable-divorce one, but a <i>hostile</i> one) from a
merciful one. <br>
</p>
<p>It's baffling.</p>
<p>-jc<br>
</p>
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