On Jan 30, 2020, at 9:37 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
On 1/24/20 8:02 AM, Simon Matter via CentOS wrote:
I've never really understood how hiding those solutions behind a wall is a good thing in/for the OpenSource world. Looks like I'm not alone :-)
A good thing is the ability for someone to be able to pay people actual money so that CentOS can actually exist. There is no CentOS (or Scientfic Linux or Oracle Linux) without RHEL. There is no RHEL if Red Hat can not make money.
If one is not smart enough to support their own install .. the answer is .. buy RHEL.
While I think I agree with you in principle, this case doesn’t really fall into the category you’re outlining, for several reasons.
1. dnf is complaining that "nothing provides module(perl:5.26)” when Perl is evidently installed. How did it get there if nothing provides it? I don’t see how this is anything but a packaging bug. If the financial stability of the Red Hat subsidiary of IBM, Inc. depends on people paying them for advice on how to get around broad-based bugs Red Hat created — or at least allowed to pass QA — that’s a perverse incentive that will ultimately damage the subsidiary.
2. I would think that the “support” you speak of, the lifeblood of the Red Hat subsidiary, is principally one-to-one, where the recipient is getting value they could not easily receive any other way. That should exclude problems so common that they end up in the knowledge base. That’s one-to-many, which means the per-recipient value of the information is amortized.
The bottom line is that I think the community here is acting as an auxiliary QA arm for Red Hat, benefiting their paying customers. Our payment? I’ll take some more CentOS, thanks. :)