IMHO, there are insider politically correct opinions about the recent changes and then, there are the individual opinions of community members, end-users and the general public.
IMHO, if you work for RedHat (IBM) your opinion could be slightly biased because of your career.
But, the history of open source is full of examples of what happens when corporations try to create commodities from distributions backed by support contracts.
IBM wants to make money, PERIOD. They paid billions for RedHat and investors, executives, want ROI and profit, period. No excuses.
So, they are locking down RedHat and closing channels to important software/materials. It is what companies do all the time.
I predict a decline in sales, a decrease in subscriptions and a percentage of the community moving away from Fedora / CentOS.
It's only logical reaction.
Does IBM deserve to make a profit for buying RedHat? Yes, indeed.
However, this is not the best way, it is the same mentality of Microsoft, Oracle and others whose products are EASILY replaced and out performed by open source community software.
IBM has had many successes over the years, many first innovations, but also a history of mistakes and flops too! This is a flop.
-----Original Message----- From: Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com Reply-To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] How will fragmentation help Red Hat Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2023 07:20:50 -0400
On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 6:13 AM Simon Matter simon.matter@invoca.ch wrote:
Hi,
As I found out yesterday, the fragmentation of the "Enterprise Linux" ecosystem just started to come true. I expect this is only the beginning and Red Hat may also start to completely hold back sources of non GPL software which is part of the "Enterprise Linux" ecosystem.
I'm really wondering, how will this help anybody and how will this help Red Hat in the long run?
Competition in the Enterprise Linux space is a good thing. If a company or community other than Red Hat starts serving a market that RHEL can't, it forces Red Hat to evaluate and adjust. It keeps everyone pushing and developing solutions that hopefully benefit end users and customers. If everyone is fully participating in open source and upstream, it makes them all better inherently.
I've been using and promoting the Red Hat "(Enterprise) Linux" ecosystem for more than two decades. But, who will I promote in the future if this ecosystem becomes fragmented?
Is it different from the non-Enterprise Linux ecosystem? What do you do there given the large variety of Linux distributions?
My personal take on this is to think about what I use and why I use it. How does something solve my needs? Does it need to be better? etc.
For example, long before I ever worked at Red Hat I was a Fedora Linux user. I love that project and distribution. I literally owe my career in some part to it. In recent years, I don't use Fedora heavily. Partly because of my day job, but also partly because my personal needs changed. I do still install almost every release in some way and try it out though. If someone asked me for a recommendation on a community Linux distribution, it would still be at the top of my list. Not because of what it was like in the past, but because of what Fedora is today which is far better than it ever has been.
If someone asked me for a recommendation on an Enterprise Linux operating system, I'd say RHEL. Yes of course because I work on it, but also because I firmly believe it is the best on the market. It's what I run on my main machine every day. If someone asked for a community Enterprise Linux project, I'd suggest CentOS Stream because of the direct ties to RHEL, but also because I believe it's a relatively young and growing project with a lot of potential to do really interesting things. However, I would probably ask what their needs were and then I'd earnestly try to make a recommendation based on that.
I'm still trying to find answers but it's quite difficult.
It is. It's difficult for an individual to decide, and it's difficult for a project or company to continuously push themselves to make sure they are the best option for the broadest number of users.
How do others, who were using and promoting the Red Hat "Enterprise Linux" ecosystem, handle this new situation?
Respectfully, I don't think it's new. We've had RHEL, SLES, OEL, CentOS Linux and Ubuntu for more than a decade. Rocky, Alma, whatever SUSE's new RHEL fork is, etc are certainly newer but the situation itself is not new. I see it as an expansion of options, but the same set of considerations still applies. Which distribution and community aligns best with your needs, goals, and beliefs? Which one would you tell your friend to use?
For me, it's still Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL.
josh
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