Hello Ljubomir (and all!).
I never heard your name until a few days ago.
Based on what you wrote in this thread, I first want to thank you personally for what you did all these years.
I'd like to provide my own POV regarding some of the issues you raise, but before that, let me briefly introduce myself.
I use Linux since 1993. Started with MCC, then SLS, then played for some months the game of "I can do this myself" (what's later been called Linux
From Scratch), then Slackware, and then Debian. For my own machines, for
most of this time, I used Debian. At home I only moved briefly to Ubuntu for some years and now recently to Fedora, but can definitely see myself going back to Debian.
At work, I started in a place that used RHL, and also added quite a lot of Debian there. Then moved to another place that had RHL, and worked on replacing this with RHEL (3, at 2005). I worked there for quite some time, and also there introduced Debian in some places, but in the important places, there wasn't really a question - for production - RHEL, and for testing/debug - CentOS.
Then I moved to Red Hat, and here I work on oVirt/RHV.
I am not representing Red Hat in any capacity. I am just a developer, and my job is somewhat far from the discussion about RHEL/CentOS/etc. - in my day job, I am mostly a user of these.
On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 11:01 AM Ljubomir Ljubojevic centos@plnet.rs wrote:
On 12/17/20 9:13 AM, Peter Eckel wrote:
Hi,
On 17. Dec 2020, at 09:03, Simon Matter simon.matter@invoca.ch wrote:
I know that Red Hat was and is free to decide what they want. But I can assure you that the only reason why quite a number RHEL subscriptions have been sold to the companies where I have worked in the past is that there was a project called CentOS!
if that is really the case (I think it could well be), the business decision of RedHat maybe makes perfect sense.
Some other distribution will step in for CentOS Linux. Rocky, Lenix, Springsdale, whatever. That distribution/s will take the role of CentOS in paving the path for RHEL without RedHat having to paying for it.
Sounds like a win/win-Situation, doesn't it?
No, it does not. Because so far Red hat was viewed as champion of Open Source and we "freeloaders" felt morally obligated to help Red Hat in any way we could. It was the right and honest thing to do.
Since Red Hat displayed greedy and stab-in-the-back attitude (buy hiding what wanted to do before they were ready), there is absolutely no moral
I wasn't part of the discussion around CentOS - neither in 2014 nor now - and the news from last week was a shock to me as well. But if you now go back and read the announcement from 2014, you can very clearly see that from the very beginning, Red Hat didn't consider, or implied, or suggested, or anything like that, that it sees CentOS as a cheap/free RHEL replacement for the poor. It wasn't presented as _charity_. It was presented, and AFAICT _was_, for the benefit of Red Hat. Go read it. There is nothing new here.
obligation to help them in any way, and many now even have negative feelings towards another "greedy company".
Before this my message was "If you are going to spend the money on Linux, it is best to spend it on RHEL, they give so much to community it is only fair."
I also think/thought/talked like that in past jobs.
But I also want to add another reason: Spend it on Red Hat/RHEL, simply because they are the best, and worth your money. If you do not think so, don't.
Since few days ago my message is "I do not like them anymore, and I do not have trust in them, so better stay clear from them."
I definitely feel your pain. I felt the same way for several days now, and slowly got used to the new situation, and am now mostly ok with it.
I am not saying it was nice. I am just saying, that right now, I do agree with upper management here, if they say we simply had no choice but break this "promise" (of support till 2029), as bad as the community would accept this.
CentOS project leaders had the same philosophy in mind when they refused to add extra packages to CentOS repositories like non-free codecs, 3rd party drivers (ElRepo had to be created separately) or even some desktop apps or KDE, MATE, etc.
There were at least two other reasons, AFAICT:
1. People do/did not want that. They wanted exactly what CentOS said it is trying to do - bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL - so that's what CentOS did.
2. Doing CentOS as-is was already hard enough. I do not think I have to remind people the situation it was in, before the Red Hat "acquisition".
All of that was redirected to Red Hat controlled EPEL or 3rd party repositories.
But Rocky Linux and Lenix (CloudLinux) do not have to be constrained with these compliance, why should they when most likely Red Hat will do their best to complicate creation of other clones any way they can.
If you ask me, CentOS Stream is a giant step forward, for anyone that wants to rebuild RHEL. I am not sure why consider it "the best Red Hat can do to complicate" this.
You can say what ever you want, but I and others do not trust them/you to be better then their worst deed.
Fair enough.
And there is no legal obligation to use RHEL and not clones in production, especially if CloudLinux develops a business model that will enhance FOSS clone and eventually spin off from RHEL into competitor just like Oracle did. Even Rocky Linux could be backed by some new company that will offer paid-for support in production.
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.
If you ask me, a _business_, making money, that decides to base their supply chain on the promise of a community project, instead of a contract with a company, is taking a significant risk. Nobody prevents this, but I'd personally not do that.
Up until this backstabbing act any company that would try to steal support income from Red Hat would have been declared greedy by CentOS and even Linux community at large. Even today I do not like Oracle because they became direct competitor to Red Hat who was spending money on development, bugfixes, etc.
But since Red Hat is now in same category as Oracle, greedy corporation, EL/Linux community will WELCOME another player in paid-support for RHEL clones, and stand by them as long as their actions support needs of "us freeloaders". Do you really think CloudLinux decided to spend $1 million because they are altruists? I do not. They have seen Red Hat hang them selves (nobody provoked them) and saw unique one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand their portfolio from only light hosting clone based on RHEL source to all-purpose distro that will help them expand their paid-for support offer to baremetal servers and workstations, maybe even laptops. All they have to do is to publish binary clone and then expand on that ecosystem by adding repos like ElRepo, EPEL, CentOSPlus, and maybe non-free repo and they will be huge success and make bundle of money, well worth the investment they are making.
And you know what? I am going to support them, and bee happy for them. And direct any money spending THEIR WAY.
Very well. I am not saying you should not.
I do not remember where I read it, but I read somewhere an estimation that continuing full support of CentOS 8 until 2029 would have cost Red Hat something like $30-$40 million. I have no reason to think this is way off. So $1 million suddenly does not look that much.
I'd like to use this opportunity to address some other issues raised recently (in this thread, perhaps also elsewhere). I'll not quote the text I am replying to, I hope that's ok.
What is Free Software, and what is Open Source? A lot was written about this, and I am not going to repeat everything. For current discussion, the main point I'd like to make is: Open Source is a business model. It's not (mainly) about giving the famous 4 freedoms to users of your software, or even about Linus's law "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Red Hat got/gets, for free, the code of many FOSS projects. In return, Red Hat gives back _all_ the code it added/adds to these, and other, projects. If you measure the amount of "Being open source" for a particular company, by dividing to value of what it gave, with the value of what it got, or, for that matter, with its revenue/income/ whatever, I am fully certain you'll not find any other company in the world, in a size similar to Red Hat's, with even close-by ratio. Think about this. Go ahead and think about the companies you know. Sure, many companies "give back", but how much? Even those that give a lot, in money, or money-worth, have, AFAIK, way lower ratios. And, BTW, why does Red Hat do that? Because the people here, like me, make it do so. Both management, and owners (now IBM, other investors before that), realize that if a significant change is done to the "wrong" side, too many people here will quit, and put the company in such a bad position, that it will simply not be worth it. memo-list was on fire, for the last week. Not fire - more like a nuclear explosion. Believe me. But people slowly understand, and things slowly calm down. I currently simply do not believe that Red Hat can become evil, in this sense. It will simply be dissolved.
To add to that: IMO, any person/company/whatever that says "Red Hat pissed me off, I do not want ever to have anything to do with them", and want to be honest to themselves, must now go and start helping Debian. Doing, or using, a RHEL rebuild, is not that, and does not make sense. To me. You want competition? The only real competition for Red Hat, IMO, is Debian. Go ahead, help them. Or, if you prefer, SuSE. But a RHEL rebuild still keeps you tightly-related to Red Hat, strongly dependent on Red Hat, as much as you claim you hate it.
I am now going to take a big risk and talk about Ubuntu. It might be the stupidest thing I did, ever. Ubuntu/Canonical are not doing well, financially. The only reason they keep being so well-known, common, etc., is because they have funding, which is not based on their income. If rich people, that made their money (also) thanks to FOSS, want to contribute back, by financing it, such as by doing Ubuntu, that's adorable, really. But this isn't Red Hat. Red Hat is a group of people that is trying to make a leaving from Open Source itself. You might claim this is simply not interesting, or irrelevant, or stupid, or whatever. You might claim that Red Hat, as-is, simply has no place in the FOSS world. But many people do not agree, including both the people inside Red Hat, and also many of its customers, and so it exists. I'd personally find it very sad if it turns out that this is wrong - that there simply is no way to make a business, make a leaving, from doing FOSS - that I, personally, must either give up on my principles and work for a non-FOSS company, or give up on having FOSS as my day job (and do it only as a spare-time hobby). I still have hopes.
Re the help that people like you provided to Red Hat, for free, by spending effort on CentOS, then push for using/buying RHEL: Can you please think for a minute, and explain why CentOS Stream is not almost the same? For people like you (and me!), that want to play with Linux, do interesting stuff with/on it, learn it, etc., but not (yet) make money from it, build a business around it, does the difference between CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream really matter? Why? You do not have to answer right now. You can try it, then decide. I completely ignored it until the announcement last week, and now, since the oVirt project realized that migration to Stream is the most reasonable choice, started moving, and already yesterday ran into a bug and fixed it this morning, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1908602. Is that really so bad? You might say: But I do not have money, and want/need to run real stuff in production, and need the stability, security fixes, etc. Fine. Was CentOS so good for you so far? CentOS was also weeks or months behind RHEL for all of its lifetime, sometimes (before the Red Hat acquisition) many months. Why do you think Stream will be that much worse?
Re timing etc.: I was really shocked last week, like everyone else. But now I think everything basically makes sense, to me. When I heard about providing only 1 year, I was shocked. 1 year? I was a sysadmin, and I know that doing the upgrades, at the time, e.g. from RHL 7 to RHEL 3, and later from RHEL 3 to 6 (yes, we did skip there 4-5), took me and my team more than a year, closer to two years. But: If any of the existing or emerging RHEL rebuilds is already good for you, or will be good enough in a year, migration to it from CentOS should not take a year. Not more than a few weeks, IMO (including testing, automation, whatever, etc.). If it's not production, you are most welcome to migrate to Stream, and depending on your needs, it might make much _more_ sense to you, than to consider a RHEL rebuild. And this also should not take that long. And if you want RHEL, and want to use it for development, see the existing options, and if you think they are not enough, or do not suit well your particular situation, others on this thread also discussed this - contact Red Hat. And if you are simply running production stuff, and your business relies on RHEL, if you ask me - RHEL is simply what you want. And if you think otherwise - just do your own calculations and buy (or not) what you think is best for you. This indeed might require a longer time, but would still make sense to do in a year.
Re the CentOS _brand_: 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. 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. Now, let's be honest: 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.
Last but not least: About the implied pressure of Red Hat on the CentOS board, that led to current state. I wasn't part of this, or related in any way, and basically all I know about it is from this list. So what I write here is purely a guess. Isn't it possible, that the board, even including non-Red-Hatters, was simply convinced that Red Hat's POV is legitimate? That just keeping CentOS as-is for 9 years would make such a damage to Red Hat, that CentOS itself would simply not exist anymore? That for the interests of CentOS, its users, it's simply unavoidable to do something like what was eventually done? People might disagree about the details (e.g. 1 year, or less, or more), but does it sound so crazy that they simply agreed?
If you ask me, there simply is no more place for a project like CentOS in this world. It does not make sense. I do not believe any of the "community competitors" will survive. I think there is enough space only for a single large-scale community distro, and this is Debian. All the others will simply remain small, or disappear, or become companies. And these companies will realize the hard work of having a business. But that's just a guess. Time will tell.
If you read so far, thanks for your time. Also, thanks again, really, for your hard work along all these years. Do not think that Red Hatters do not appreciate that.
Best regards,