On 12/9/2020 10:18 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 04:03:42PM +0000, Laack, Andrea P wrote:
The companies that pay for RHEL licenses for production and use CentOS for test will be left with a large problem. They will either need to purchase double the number of RHEL licenses and switch to RHEL for testing or go to another distribution. RHEL + 1 will not work for testing application compatibility with patches.
In the cases where RHEL + 0.1 (note not +1) won't work, I think it's incredibly likely that this will be covered by the expanded low- and no-cost RHEL offerings.
Part of the buried lede here is that with more RHEL accessibility, a lot of the function that CentOS served for users will not be necessary anymore.
It's buried, but the decision-makers failed to understand that the suddenness of this decision, outside of the community expectation for CentOS Linux continuing to be a thing (remember: Scientific Linux continued supporting SL6 right up to the end even after announcing that there would be no SL8), calls into question the stability of a lot of RedHat's actions when it comes to distro decisions. Based on other emails, the CentOS Board perhaps understood this and the people issuing directions from RedHat perhaps did not. That does not bode well.
Enterprises, and enterprise users, need reliability and confidence that their choices are the correct ones. How will RedHat/IBM restore confidence in the longevity of the offerings it's producing?
-jc