On 17.12.2020 06:51, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 5:12 PM Julien Pivotto <roidelapluie@inuits.eu mailto:roidelapluie@inuits.eu> wrote:
On 16 Dec 17:08, Mike McGrath wrote: > > It makes a lot of sense that people would be upset about this. We very > much should have set better expectations at the launch of CentOS 8 but at > that point no specific dates around CentOS8 had been decided other than to > release it. Mike, Somehow it ended up on https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product <https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product> , so someone took the decision to write it here.Yes, I'm going to explain what happened as I've covered on IRC.
First, we didn't say anything about the EOL date because we didn't have an agreement at that time and that's the screwup. That absolutely could have been handled better.
What happened after that was a community member, not knowing any differently edited the wiki with a date that everyone thought was the right date. This was not an unreasonable thing for them to do. Any other date written after that probably got it from the wiki.
I think many of you think that some implicit guarantee was made, or are applying some standard to CentOS similar to what you would a contractual agreement and those will never be the same thing.
I think Red Hat did everything we could to stress that this rebuild was community supported and best effort. Anyone mixing "free" and "enterprise" at work need to accept any risks that come along with that, I always did when I ran CentOS in production. Even with all of that, we gave a year's notice for 8 and let 7 continue in its natural life. We provided a viable (but not identical) alternative, and are working to find ways too get free RHEL to people. We're going to stand by that all of that, why? Because at the end of the day, any comparisons to us and Oracle, or "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" are unfounded. We made a very unpopular decision here, I get that. But the
difference is while we stand by that decision we actually do care about the impact it has had and are trying to make it right with many of you.
I suppose you (RH) have included, as the impact's component, the fact your (RH's) words and whatever promises you (RH) do are now of little value.
From my viewpoint, it's dead simple. CentOS was purchased for the sake of reaching a business goal. Now that goal is reached, CentOS Linux is buried (nothing personal, a business decision), and the uproar can be safely ignored - after all, it's mostly taken from people who aren't RH customers.
Some will be converted to RH customers (see also below), some will be free-to-use testers at CentOS Stream, all the rest are free to go wherever they wish.
This is a good time to remind people of part of Chris Wright's announcement
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux
and centos-questions@redhat.com mailto:centos-questions@redhat.com. This is a mailing list (not a sales lead generator). If you're using CentOS Linux today, and feel you cannot use stream. Email us and tell us why. The people who are creating new free and low-cost RHEL programs want to hear from you. We don't know who you are. And even if you are a Red Hat customer, previously you likely hid your CentOS deployments from us and so we don't know about them. And I repeat: this isn't going to our sales team, they don't have access to this list, this is about making sure we structure our future RHEL programs correctly.
"Low-cost" is the keyword, isn't it?
Corporation is all about the profit. Period. If you can't use the nice CentOS Stream (and thus help RH to serve as free tester and help RH to get more profits), RH will provide you with low-cost replacement.
It may even be free. Say, for a year. Just business decision, nothing personal.
(BTW, I mailed at that address, I am quite curious to see what can be proposed).