Digimer wrote:
I think there is a business case to be made for CentOS, from the point of view of Red Hat. My experience has been that a lot of people/companies start out on CentOS. After a while, those that succeed and do well eventually want to switch to Red Hat proper. As good as CentOS is, by it's very nature, it will always lag behind RHEL in so far as updates are concerned.
Given all this; I think there is an argument for Red Hat wanting to assist CentOS. As we saw with this release, the delay drove people away from EL. I am sure many went to Debian or other non-EL distributions. Each of these defections is another potential future customer lost to Red Hat.
My view is that problem arose when Oracle came into picture. They are aggressively steeling Red Hat customers using Rad Hat EL source.
That is very possibly why Red Hat made recompiling EL source much harder, which reflected to CentOS team unprepared for such change.
And I do agree with you about what Red Hat should do.
Ljubomir