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

_______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 7:11 AM mario juliano grande-balletta mario.balletta@gmail.com wrote:

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

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

I think I finally need to remove myself from the centos mail list but coming from @redhat worker trying to explain what their company has done, is pretty disingenuous to say the least. It's pretty clear what they are trying to do and it's all driven by greed, have seen it over and over in the opensource world, and lets be clear thats what it always comes down to is greed. Bottom line its a d*ck move by Redhat, but technically still meets the letter of the GPL so it is what it is. IMHO they basically became another Oracle and we know how most feel about them, but hey someone has this great idea to make more money they have the right based on the GPL to do it..I moved a few servers to Rocky when they killed Centos but this is it for me, I will migrate my remaining servers over to anything but Redhat, they are dead to me. I had been using Centos for many years, when Karanbir Singh was running things and they would go to meet ups and you could get t-shirts etc..Was a great run but Redhat has ruined all that and now I just could care less what Redhat does from here on out. I'm nobody, but where I do work we have options for which linux distro that we want to run, I can assure you I will not be spinning up an Redhat instances...fool me once, fool me twice...

Tom Bishop

Tom nailed it for me, similar boat. We moved to Rocky as a holding position with their LTS, but it just doesn't make sense any more to use a Redhat base with any new server.

The trust I think has gone since the Centos rug pull, and that's important. I do think we'll see some changes to come (I can't work out if Suse forking RH is interesting or not), but I think most people want stability with security.

I would like to say a genuine thanks to all those who have helped previously.

Ian

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 1:43 PM Tom Bishop bishoptf@gmail.com wrote:

I think I finally need to remove myself from the centos mail list but coming from @redhat worker trying to explain what their company has done, is pretty disingenuous to say the least. It's pretty clear what they are trying to do and it's all driven by greed, have seen it over and over in the opensource world, and lets be clear thats what it always comes down to is greed. Bottom line its a d*ck move by Redhat, but technically still meets the letter of the GPL so it is what it is. IMHO they basically became another Oracle and we know how most feel about them, but hey someone has this great idea to make more money they have the right based on the GPL to do it..I moved a few servers to Rocky when they killed Centos but this is it for me, I will migrate my remaining servers over to anything but Redhat, they are dead to me. I had been using Centos for many years, when Karanbir Singh was running things and they would go to meet ups and you could get t-shirts etc..Was a great run but Redhat has ruined all that and now I just could care less what Redhat does from here on out. I'm nobody, but where I do work we have options for which linux distro that we want to run, I can assure you I will not be spinning up an Redhat instances...fool me once, fool me twice...

Tom Bishop _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Well, as RH's announcement is quite some day ago, I had time to reflect this jumble. The whole thing is much more complex than people want to admit and I will not decompose this all here now. Honestly I see the open source ecosystem like a hardware store. You have everything that you need to build your own home, thats all. So, some entity is needed to build it - a worker, consultant, hobby crafts(wo)man, agency, midsize firm, corporation et cetera, and that is the truth the we all should face it. To make it clear, what product do you get when a loosy community build a distribution, with components of projects that are

You'll get distributions like Debian, Arch or also FreeBSD and other BSDs. One thing they had in common with Red Hat distributions is that they are of high quality and one could fully trust them.

Unfortunately I fail to still trust Red Hat as I did in the past.

Regards, Simon

On 2023-07-13 05:11, mario juliano grande-balletta wrote:

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 see this hypothesis relatively often, but there's no evidence to support it, and it doesn't make much logical sense.

If Red Hat (or IBM) wanted to "lock down" RHEL, they wouldn't be focusing on Stream, which opens it up (and makes it easier to fork.)

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 4:21 AM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:

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.

Thank you for this response, Josh. I can sympathize with your love of Fedora, and it is nice to see how you characterize CentOS Stream. I, too, hope Stream evolves and grows into something that's not just a place for contributions, but also something that draws users and encourages innovation.

I am NOT a Red Hat employee (few things are more obvious than that). From the outside, I don't know if inside Red Hat there is a culture at war with itself, or if everybody is of one mind. That wouldn't mirror any free software community I've seen, so I'd like to think there's some (hopefully) healthy debate going on.

Right now I feel like CentOS Stream is not where it's "meant to be," and nobody seems to be talking about exactly what that is. I know what I want it to be, but I'm not sure the project itself has figured out its direction.

I'm thinking the downstreams that base on Stream will be doing the things that users want and Stream itself isn't doing right now. That's everything from the live media that AlmaLinux provides (a great thing!) to the critical patches that Stream doesn't send to users in a timely manner.

I do want to thank all those Red Hat employees and other community members who believe in free software and community distributions.

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 10:48 AM Gordon Messmer gordon.messmer@gmail.com wrote:

On 2023-07-13 03:12, Simon Matter wrote:

...

As I found out yesterday, the fragmentation of the "Enterprise Linux" ecosystem just started to come true.

I've been trying to figure out what SUSE meant when they announced a "hard fork" of RHEL. If they mean to maintain a fork that remains interface-compatible with RHEL (and a fork that doesn't remain compatible doesn't make much sense, because the thing that everyone wants is the benefit of RHEL's integration with other vendors), then they'll probably periodically branch from Stream, the same way that RHEL does.

If that happens, and if it's successful, the irony is that through poor communication, Red Hat might have actually made progress in creating a *less* fragmented ecosystem of distributions all conforming to a common ABI, descending from Stream.

...

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 think that's exactly the opposite of the direction that Red Hat is moving. CentOS Stream makes the RHEL product more open than it has ever been -- including making it easier to create real Enterprise-ready products that compete on level ground with RHEL, in ways that clones never could.

I get it, I have seen you post this over and over in the mail list in regards to how great Centos Stream is. Well its not what the original Centos was, its something very different, it may work for you and others but it's not the same. If it were we would not be having this discussion and there would be no need for Rocky, alma etc..If it was what the community wanted then we would not have seen the mass exodus to other distro's that came to try to fill the gap, no it's not the same at all, it's different and thats fine but folks are free to chose to use it or something else. Seems most have chosen to use something else and RH continues to burn them down also...again it's there choice, so now that I see what they really want to do I also have a choice to not to continue or recommend their product, again as referenced by one of the many RH articles, we are all just freeloaders so we shouldn't be missed.

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 12:17 PM Gordon Messmer gordon.messmer@gmail.com wrote:

On 2023-07-13 09:00, Tom Bishop wrote:

...

as referenced by one of the many RH articles, we are all just freeloaders so we shouldn't be missed.

I don't believe there are any Red Hat articles that call user freeloaders.

I'm aware of one personal blog, not on the redhat.com site, in which the term "freeloader" is discussed as a term sometimes used informally by staff to describe large businesses that run production networks on a self-supported distribution, but issues that affect that production network are reported through a small number of support subscriptions. That's a very narrow use, and it's specifically organizations who abuse the support that Red Hat sells, by proxying production issues through RHEL systems.

And it's the behavior of individuals, not the position of the company.

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Eh I beg to differ it's pretty clear that Magnus is calling folks freeloaders... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/problem-rocky-linux-free-beer-magnus-glantz/

But I know he is just a principal solution architect so I know it's just his opinion, but no it's crystal clear where RH stands in regards to this ..