On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 4:12 PM Chris Mair chris@1006.org wrote:
But as a business, since you're not providing Red Hat with profit (none of our communities are), what are you
providing
that would result in continued sponsorship of a downstream rebuild?
Installation count share?
Without CenOS Linux you'll look at 1% of Linux servers running RHEL (I'm sure you have a more precise number, and I'm sure it will be as embarrassing...).
In a world without CentOS Linux why should I pay for RH courses? Why should I renew my RHCE? Why should educators choose such a rare distribution to teach Linux? At this point why not go with Ubuntu? Debian? Why teach yum/dnf when most servers will use apt?
This one is interesting and one we discussed in length. Unfortunately, if you look at any "top" list. Ubuntu is clumped together, and Red Hat gets broken out into Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS. As for why educators would pick a "rare" distribution, because we're going to have a program that caters directly to education.
You say us (the community) isn't providing you (Red Hat) with profit. Well, who do you think installed CentOS Linux and recommended RHEL to our pointy haired bosses that wanted support contracts?
Maybe you sold 1 RHEL subscription for any 100 CentOS we installed.
Well, now you're going to sell exactly 0 RHEL subscriptions for any of the 100 Ubuntu or Debian boxes I'm going to set up with my clients.
Unfortunately with these last ones we've seen no evidence of this happening (where CentOS is actually leading to RHEL sales. We have seen a little evidence of the opposite. Where we once had RHEL sales, and now have CentOS. Why? "They're both built by Red Hat, right?"
Before you say "Stream", the single most killer argument against Stream is that you have broken any trust when you moved the EOL of CentOS Linux 8 from 2029 to 2021.
I think we lost a lot of trust due to a pretty serious mix-up about the EOL date announcement, but I don't think it has erased all the good Red Hat has done and continues to do.
Now Red Hat employees jump through hoops to tell us how great that'll be.
What guerantees that in two year's time you're not going to kill Stream because "it didn't provide anything to RH"?
Nothing, we and all companies kill products all the time. I don't recall this level of outrage over mugshot. We're taking a big risk with Stream and if it doesn't work out, we'll make changes there too as we should. It makes no sense to continue doing something that isn't working out.
Somebody already mentioned "fool me once..."...
I'm still angry and I still cannot believe you appear to be oblivious to the huge blunder you made with this incredible EOL shortening. You've basically killed the CentOS brand in one single move.
We're not oblivious to it. If this were any other organization or relationship, we'd help make amends by giving you your money back. That's just not an option here. And you can say we killed it all you want, what we've done is significantly change it. You may not recognize it anymore but there are many people on this list who we talked to before the announcement and that we've seen now who are actually interested in coming on this journey with us. Thats good.
I suspect the very trust that you all were putting in Red Hat to continue to produce CentOS Linux as though it were actually a 10-year enterprise-grade distribution for production was part of the problem here. To further demonstrate that problem, many of the replies I've seen look as though people did their risk assessments with "we're relying on Red Hat for our OS" instead of "We're relying on a community for our OS." I'd imagine some of you are having very awkward conversations with your management chain about this. No one using Fedora or WildFly thinks that way.
We wanted CentOS to flourish in development environments, in upstream Open Source CI, and to help with things like OpenStack. I'm not sure if we accomplished any of that. For those that think perhaps that was the mistake all those years ago, I personally agree with you.
-Mike
Bye, Chris.
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