On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 6:52 PM Mike McGrath mmcgrath@redhat.com wrote:
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.
This isn't how Free / Open Source projects work. It is not normal for a community that exists precisely to provide a particular feature, is "acquired" by a company that claims to have the community interest at heart, and then leverages this power to replace the product with something that provides value to the company, and does not directly compete with company.
I have no doubt of your sincerity. However, I also believe that you may have been surrounded by other people with similar conflicts of interest and created a sort of "echo chamber" that after several months made it seem entirely reasonable to do.
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.
Why is this a Red Hat decision to make? You say "community supported and best effort", but then you speak in terms of Red Hat's interests alone. Why can't it be a community decision, supported by the community? Is this because Red Hat took ownership of the branding, and stated that the branding could not be used for the original purpose any longer?
This is a good time to remind people of part of Chris Wright's announcement and 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.
I spent a great deal of effort trying to explain to Red Hat the problems with their subscription model in 2015 through 2018. It went nowhere. Red Hat made no meaningful effort to adjust their subscription model to be compatible with our requirements. The proposals made to compromise were non-proposals. I wanted to spend money on Red Hat, but against reasonable terms - and no reasonable terms were offered.
CentOS 8 Stream is not a replacement for CentOS 8, and everybody in this thread knows it. This means that a choice to use CentOS 8 Stream, is a choice to use something entirely new - something somewhere in between RHEL 8 and Fedora 33, and this is not a reasonable suggestion for many "Enterprise" use cases.
The idea that an "Enterprise" is "hiding CentOS" from Red Hat is part of the dangerous ethos that is on display here. Red Hat may substantially contribute to the community - but Red Hat is for the most part an assembly of free / open source projects that were given to Red Hat to use freely. Red Hat is reselling the works of others. Like thousands (millions?) of others, I contribute back to upstream projects. I also contribute fixes which Red Hat packages and builds into products that they sell to Enterprise customers. Red Hat isn't paying my salary. Where is my cut? I don't actually want a cut. I want Red Hat to be a hero of Free / Open Source, and show leadership in how to do things right. Killing CentOS 8 is an example of how to do things wrong.
The question is what happens next. There are thousands of people with budget, skill, and now motivation, to do something in response to this choice. Will these people embrace CentOS 8 Stream for development, and pay for RHEL 8 for stability? Or, will these people reject this conclusion, and either rebuild CentOS as it was originally intended, or simply move to another vendor that is not as predatory? Oracle Linux and Ubuntu both look like saints today.