Les Mikesell wrote:
*sigh*... Don't take this as a complaint about the quality of the project, just the PR vibes here. You aren't giving people the warm fuzzies about the project's ability to survive when you make it come across as having a stranglehold of control. If we wanted a one man show we'd probably be using whitebox. Things happen - people need backups. We'd feel better if you shared your contingency plans.
I think he did - use RHEL, it's a drop in replacement. Red Hat seems to be a pretty healthy company at this point and I at least don't expect them to go away in the near-mid term.
I'm kind of surprised of some of the folks on this list how high their expectations are of the CentOS team, they do the best that they can, they don't require anything in return, though I'm sure they appreciate donations and stuff.
about your ability to continue the best balance possible, I don't think you are saying the right things to inspire public confidence.
I'd rather the team be honest(which it seems they have been) on their expectations and stuff rather than spin PR stuff to boost themselves/distribution.
As time goes on it seems more and more sad the volumes of folks that seem to believe everything should be free and at the same time work perfectly, the number of corporations that base their systems/products off of CentOS is pretty big, and I'd be surprised if they contributed anywhere near the value of the product back into the community.
It's a fight I have on occasion even at my company, where some people want to replace solutions that they previous paid for with free ones just because they are "free". I think in those situations companies should at least strongly consider some sort of contribution back to the community, the easiest is just in some $$, but contributing code and fixes would be nice too, but companies that do that seem to be very few and far between. Going with RHEL can be a good compromise, which is one reason I'm pushing for RHEL here as a good chunk of what is paid for RHEL goes to the open source community in the form of developer hours and stuff.
Unfortunate times we are in..
nate (CentOS user for about 4 years now, Debian user for about 11 years)