On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 11:59 AM Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
On 12/15/20 3:50 PM, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 1:41 PM Trevor Hemsley <trevor.hemsley@ntlworld.com mailto:trevor.hemsley@ntlworld.com>
wrote:
It's not too late to do the right thing. Red Hat can still back off this betrayal of the community that use CentOS Linux and set CentOS Linux free. ... You can hope it'll go away but it won't. Red Hat will always be the company that broke its promises and killed CentOS Linux.I'm in this weird position where I'm regularly hearing from people that thought that Red Hat made some sort of "We'll never change and CentOS Linux will be around forever" announcement. I'd suggest everyone go back and re-read the original press release (I was not involved with the original agreement) -
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-force...
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https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-force...
First, Mike, thanks for taking the time to reply here; I for one greatly appreciate it. I like Red Hat, and I like CentOS, and I count several current and former Red Hat employees as long-time close acquaintances, and even friends. Finally got to meet Bill Nottingham a few weeks ago, but there are many from the 'old days' I've not yet had opportunity to meet in person.
You can nitpick at words, or take a quote out of context. But don't be naive and pretend we had some grand plan for all of this from the beginning. Just like anyone, Red Hat changes and makes decisions based on the best information we have at the time. CentOS Linux made sense in 2014, it doesn't make sense in 2020.
The quote that has me somewhat riled up is from
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/transforming-development-experience-within-ce... : "CentOS Stream is parallel to existing CentOS builds; this means that nothing changes for current users of CentOS Linux and services, even those that begin to explore the newly-released CentOS 8. " In the context of the posted statement, and being the first sentence under the heading of "What does this mean for CentOS," this is to me a clear statement that nothing changes with the then-current (2019) CentOS model especially for users of CentOS 8; had CentOS 8 not been so specifically called out I personally wouldn't feel quite so blindsided. Yes, business happens; yes, real life happens; yes promises get broken. But broken promises produce broken relationships and have consequences, such as broken trust.
That was accurate at the time of that writing as no decisions had been made.
I started deployment into production based on that September 24, 2019 statement, and the published 2029 EOL date; I specifically waited on CentOS 8's ecosystem to mature for upgrades from C6 rather than go ahead an upgrade to C7 based on this statement, delaying, in one instance, a workstation upgrade six months, with the user of that workstation complaining about the delay nearly daily, and my reply being "In order to get your new system to be stable until 2029 instead of 2024 I still think we should go with CentOS 8 for you;" if I had known then what I know now she would have gotten CentOS 7 and I would have had many less headaches for most of a year.
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.
You may not like it, but the CentOS community didn't evolve in any way with the industry. When I think about the talent on this list, and in IRC, I can't help but wonder what went wrong.
There are a number of things that could have been done early on to make things different, in my opinion. And you're right: the CentOS community has seen very little change in many years. Some call it stagnation; some call it stability. Some might even call it denial.
Using the Debian model from the get-go (unstable -> testing -> stable) instead of (Fedora+secretsauce -> RHEL x.0 beta) might have helped back then; that IS what CentOS Stream is doing, adding that 'testing' portion, although you guys at Red Hat might prefer to not call it that. The sequence becomes, if I'm thinking this through correctly, (Fedora+secretsauce -> RHEL x.0 Beta -> RHEL x.0 -> for $point in 1 2 3 4 5 6 do (CentOS x Stream -> RHEL x.${point}); done) or somesuch.
But then there's the 'secretsauce' part of the issue. RHEL development has been opaque since RHLEE 6.2E; RHL development was opaque prior to that, even. I was on the Beta Team back in the day; I remember the city code names, the NDA, etc; I still have my executed copy of that NDA, for that matter, so there are certain cities I never speak of (:-) in case you missed the humor); still have some of the boxed sets from those days, too. Lack of transparency is not a new issue. CentOS Stream, in this regard, is a very refreshing development and will likely be a big win for transparency. But will CentOS Stream eliminate the 'secretsauce' bridge currently existing between Fedora and RHEL? (It may be covered in one of the numerous posts about it, so forgive me if I missed it). Will CentOS 9 Stream begin with a Fedora snapshot? (How that develops may not be even known by you guys at Red Hat as far as I know). If a transparent path from Fedora through the entire Full Support phase of RHEL can be developed in the form of CentOS Stream, I think that's a very good thing. I wouldn't mind using that myself, as long as hardware drivers don't frequently break that I need to use. And currently they break every stinking point release!!!
The RHEL9 bootstrap process has already started with Fedora ELN and I'm expecting the CentOS Stream 9 code/builds to be showing up in the next few months, sometime before May. (note, the 5 year lifecycle of CentOS stream doesn't actually starts then, we don't start the clock until RHEL9 ships so these are all "pre-releases).
 As for the rest of you, where were you?
The mailing list archives are full of messages over the years from users offering to help in various ways. Me personally? Well, my name and email were still in the changelog for PostgreSQL through the end of CentOS 4, at least; I did my contributions upstream when I was able to spend the time to do so. Life happens; those contributions had to yield to RL issues.
And sure, we could have turned CentOS back over to some non-Red Hat foundation. But the fact is contrary to popular belief, we actually like the engineers that work on CentOS, we like many of the users who have cultivated relationships with Red Hat over the years. We intend on going forward with a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship there. If that's not you, and you're ready to leave - I think that's unfortunate but I understand.
I seem to be one of the very few in my local area still advocating Red Hat-based systems. Most of the Linux talent in my area is rabidly anti-Red Hat. It got exponentially worse last week. Several years back, I got to meet Michael Tiemann and Mark Webbink in Asheville; watched TruthHappens the first time; everything was so positive.  Michael accepted my invitation to tour $dayjob, and he seemed to have a great time. For a while the local LUGs were less anti-Red Hat.... How times have changed in the LUG-scape around here.
If it could be done over? The most detrimental statements made, in my opinion, were those statements that could be read to imply a commitment by Red Hat for CentOS 8 until 2029; this was after all the published roadmap by the CentOS Prject prior to December. In the press release you linked to, there is a now-dead link to a FAQ page; thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can re-read this FAQ page (
https://web.archive.org/web/20140906203025/http://community.redhat.com/cento... ) and see that maybe it was wishful thinking the way I read the very positively-worded spin that FAQ put on virtually all questions.
People being upset about the CentOS Stream 8 dates makes a ton of sense to me. But people thinking that we'd be shipping CentOS Linux 1,500 in the year 2984 doesn't. Taking someone's words about our intentions at some time or plans at some time, and then expanding them across an infinite timeline is just not how anything works.
And then there's the statement I quoted at the very beginning of this reply; there was wording that strongly implied a commitment that "nothing changes" specifically for CentOS 8. The September 24, 2019 statement, in my opinion, is what primarily set the stage for this backlash you see today.
Again, that was accurate at that time. If I could go back in time not do a CentOS Linux 8 release, I would have. But it wasn't in the cards.
-Mike
Best regards.