On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 03:15:17PM +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
Forgive a bit of cynicism ...
Sure, some cynicism is absolutely warranted. It's a big change.
"If you want to keep using RHEL for free, you will have to put up with making sure that our paying customers get better quality releases"
I mean.... That's not the _worst_ deal I've ever heard. But actually it's better than you've stated, because the benefit to others happens even regardless of the paying customers -- others using CentOS Stream also benefit. And for that matter since many of fixes go upstream, users of open source in general.
(In some ways, this is like: being a paying customer of RHEL also benefits other paying customers. And for that matter, those paying customers benefit all of the free users, and Fedora, and hundreds of upstreams.)
"CentOS will become the developer playground"
This one is categorically not the case. Even Fedora isn't a developer playground. Everything landing in CentOS Stream is actually *planned* (with emphasis intentional) to go in a future RHEL release.
Previously, all the development around RHEL releases was done in secret, in the Red Hat black box. Now it's out of the box and can be watched. There may be some launch pains, but I expect the average quality of an update hitting CentOS Stream to be very high.
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-ente...]
Red Hat's perspective is "CentOS is ours now; IBM have told us to make sure it's pulling its weight or we aren't allowed to put any resources into it"
Of course, that link says nothing of the sort. It's easy to imagine IBM conspiracies, but the honest truth is that there's nothing to that. Now, I don't know everything, and it may be the case that IBM is secretly pulling all sorts of invisible strings and making Red Hat management dance, but I do know about *this* particular thing and IBM had nothing to do with it.