On 12/9/2020 1:43 PM, david wrote:
CentOS Fans:
I've spent hours yesterday and today reading the messages about the Centos 8 Stream, and expect to do it for the next few days also. I would recommend that anyone contemplating some action, such as switching to a different distribution, advising your management to change, or similar, postpone that action for a while. Let the dust settle, let the policy makers evaluate the comments, and watch for clarifications and/or modifications of the plan.
For lack of a better date, I suggest waiting until the first business day of 2021 (Monday 04 January) before taking any significant actions.
Personally, I've already invested some of my time incorporating CentOS 8. I've also been working with Ubuntu since that seems to be the only way forward with Raspberry Pi and Apple/Intel machines, but I'll keep my CentOS 7/8 machines stable for this month at least.
David
Agreed, time will tell. I, personally, think the technical quality of streams is likely to be very high.
But I think that's the least concern. What we can decide today (without putting much thought into it) is that we cannot rely upon CentOS to be any particular thing. It's a brand and decisions will be made for us about that brand by the people paying for the work, which is their absolute right. But the "optics" of this look pretty bad. We've seen distros perish, but they generally waste away from lack of interest. Clearly, this isn't the case for CentOS.
I'm horrified by the people (none from CentOS, AFAICT) saying "CentOS doesn't owe you [CentOS user] anything!" That's like saying my friend doesn't owe me anything... Of course he doesn't, but it would be awfully unfriendly of him to inform me that, going forward, I'm going to be invoiced for our chats. If CentOS announced that it was too costly and they needed donations, I'm sure people would be less distressed if CentOS eventually died. This change seems far more mercenary. CentOS doesn't "owe" me anything, but I don't "owe" the brand anything either and I do have a strong preference for distros that seem free and governed freely.
I really cannot get too excited that the CentOS brand will be even more central to RHEL. I expect the new CentOS will be super-duper, but CentOS as we knew it is being killed, and I'm sorry to see it go.
Someone has a petition to get CentOS to reconsider... What would it matter if they do? Probably just in the velocity of people switching to Oracle/Debian/Ubuntu/Windows/ETC? and in how fast some people switch to streams or RHEL.
-Alan