Fantastic news!
CentOS and RHEL have been mutually beneficial projects for years. As a user of both, I am extremely happy to see the ties grow between the communities.
digimer
On 07/01/14 04:09 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
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With great excitement I'd like to announce that we are joining the Red Hat family. The CentOS Project ( http://www.centos.org ) is joining forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards team ( http://community.redhat.com/ ) to foster rapid innovation beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies. Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we maintain the established base.
We are also launching the new CentOS.org website ( http://www.centos.org ).
The new initiative is going to be overseen by the new CentOS Governing Board. The initial Board comprises of the existing CentOS Core team members :
- Ralph Angenent
- Tru Hyunh
- Johnny Hughes JR
- Jim Perrin
- Karanbir Singh
and also sees new members:
- Fabian Arrotin, who comes to the board nominated from the community
- Carl Trieloff, Karsten Wade, and Mike McLean join us, nominated by
Red Hat.
Please join me in welcoming the new members to the Board.
The key operating points of the Board are going to be: Public, Open, and Inclusive. You can find more information about the governance model, the board, and the operating policies we are proposing at http://www.centos.org/about/governance/
Furthermore, some of the existing CentOS Core members are moving to take up roles at Red Hat, as a part of their sponsorship of the CentOS Project, allowing these people to work on the Project as their primary job function. This includes Johnny Hughes Jr, Jim Perrin, Fabian Arrotin, and myself. We will be working with and operating out of the Red Hat Open Source and Standards team in the CTO's Office.
Some of the things that are not changing:
- The CentOS Linux platform isn't changing. The process and methods
built up around the platform however are going to become more open, more inclusive and transparent.
- The sponsor driven content network that has been central to the
success of the CentOS efforts over the years stays intact.
- The bugs, issues, and incident handling process stays as it has been
with more opportunities for community members to get involved at various stages of the process.
- The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain.
Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated from the RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm / source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. In summary: we retain an upstream.
Feel free to reach out if you have specific concerns about how this change impacts your CentOS story. URLs mentioned at the bottom of this email should be a good starting point.
Some of the key things that are changing:
- Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL. This should not have
any impact to our ability to do what we have done in the past, it should facilitate a more rapid pace of development and evolution for our work on the community platform.
- Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial
content delivery resources - how we are able to consume these and when we are able to make use of this is to be decided.
- Sources that we consume, in the platform, in the addons, or the
parallel stacks such as Xen4CentOS will become easier to consume with a git.centos.org being setup, with the scripts and rpm metadata needed to create binaries being published there. The Board also aims to put together a plan to allow groups to come together within the CentOS ecosystem as a Special Interest Group (SIG) and build CentOS Variants on our resources, as officially endorsed. You can read about the proposal at http://www.centos.org/variants/
- Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some
of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind closed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test, and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.
The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted, proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner on the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone to come along and participate.
Contacting us works best via the established community mechanisms.
- Real time chats via IRC ( http://wiki.centos.org/irc ) ; To keep
conversation sanity intact, I recommend using the #centos-devel channel to discuss project related activity while #centos is best used for end user conversations.
- The Mailing lists are a great way to interface with the developers,
contributors and the community at large ( http://lists.centos.org ). As with IRC, we recommend using the centos-devel list to talk about project related issues while the general centos list is best used for end user conversations.
- The CentOS Forums are another great way to engage in conversation
with other users ( http://www.centos.org/forums ), if you prefer that mechanism.
All the above mentioned venues are public and open to the community, should you wish to discuss something privately, you can email us at centosdev@centos.org. Press requests should be sent to press@centos.org. Please note that it will take us much longer to reply to private requests as compared to content on the public venues.
In the coming days we are going to create opportunities for people to come and get involved in more face to face interactions. Starting with a regular scheduled office-hours format hangouts ( http://wiki.centos.org/OfficeHours ) that start early next week. We are trying to split the sessions into two different timezones so as to maximise the number of people who are able to join. The sessions will run live, with #centos-devel on irc.freenode.net being used for conversations alongside.
We are also running a CentOS Dojo on the 31st Jan 2014 at Belgium ( http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2014 ); The event will run two tracks, with lots of opportunities for social interaction between the talks; followed by CentOS in the Clouds Hack sessions. We are limited in the number of people we can accomodate, so I encourage everyone to register early.
I want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors, the contributors and the CentOS team members for all their help over the years, the project is built completely upon those contributions - and I look forward to seeing even more involvement from everyone as we move forward.
A Request:
We are still sorting out content in various places and it might take a day or two to get everything in place. In the mean time if you find something stale and perhaps misleading in the new context ( or the old one! ) please drop in on #centos-devel at irc.centos.org and let us know.
Some URLS:
- http://www.centos.org/ The CentOS Project
- http://wiki.centos.org/ CentOS Community wiki
- http://community.redhat.com/ RedHat OSAS
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/1/red-hat-and-centos-joi...
- Red Hat Press Release
- http://community.redhat.com/centos-faq - Red Hat FAQ's about the
initiative
- http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ - CentOS FAQ's about the initiative
Enjoy! and regards,
Karanbir Singh and everyone from the CentOS team,
Karanbir Singh, Project Chair, The CentOS Project +44-207-0999389 | http://www.centos.org/ | twitter.com/CentOS GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/
iEYEARECAAYFAlLMbQcACgkQMA29nj4Tz1sTnQCgj2fYxYpTjA0KwH7TpCWjE4gg w2cAniQWb/nh6Zn/8daSQ3EAfLIzGNKg =KJOk -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ CentOS-announce mailing list CentOS-announce@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-announce
On 07/01/14 04:09 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
- Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some
of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind closed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test, and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the
effort.
The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted, proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner on the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone to come along and participate.
Does this have any impact on security metadata so that the yum security plugin works without using things like the CEFS script for spacewalk?
On Wednesday, January 08, 2014 05:14 AM, Digimer wrote:
Fantastic news!
CentOS and RHEL have been mutually beneficial projects for years. As a user of both, I am extremely happy to see the ties grow between the communities.
digimer
Centos for the desktop! RHEL for the backend! Okay, I'm done frothing.
I view this as a takeover. I view this as a few who kept how to rebuild RHEL a state secret benefiting financially. I don't see how a community benefits when we cannot recreate for ourselves what is being done here. I don't see how we benefit when a large company comes in and buys their way into the board and pays off all members. Where is the Community's say in this? This is a payoff. Will we get releases sooner? Will we know how to rebuild the build environment for ourselves? What if Redhat slowly makes using CentOS painful to incentivize using RHEL? If Redhat had good intentions why don't they give unsupported RHEL for free themselves. Granted the probably want to keep OEL and the like from being able to freely rebuild and plagiarize and charge money for their stuff, but we , the Community, the masses of users, are stuck now between behemoths and their lackeys taking payouts throwing us whatever table scraps they want and we are powerless to change this.
There is no makeworld or emerge world here, just binaries that magically get produced and peppered on an ftp whenever someone gets around to it.
-- View this message in context: http://centos.1050465.n5.nabble.com/Re-CentOS-CentOS-announce-CentOS-Project... Sent from the CentOS mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
On 17/01/14 11:12 AM, IonPacepa wrote:
I view this as a takeover. I view this as a few who kept how to rebuild RHEL a state secret benefiting financially. I don't see how a community benefits when we cannot recreate for ourselves what is being done here. I don't see how we benefit when a large company comes in and buys their way into the board and pays off all members. Where is the Community's say in this? This is a payoff. Will we get releases sooner? Will we know how to rebuild the build environment for ourselves? What if Redhat slowly makes using CentOS painful to incentivize using RHEL? If Redhat had good intentions why don't they give unsupported RHEL for free themselves. Granted the probably want to keep OEL and the like from being able to freely rebuild and plagiarize and charge money for their stuff, but we , the Community, the masses of users, are stuck now between behemoths and their lackeys taking payouts throwing us whatever table scraps they want and we are powerless to change this.
There is no makeworld or emerge world here, just binaries that magically get produced and peppered on an ftp whenever someone gets around to it.
One of the beautiful things about open source is the ability to fork, create a new project, etc.
CentOS was never under any requirement to release their build methods. Whether that was a good or bad choice is not very relevant now.
If you (and others) feel that the build process needed to create a binary compatible is a worthy goal, you can start a project to do just that.
On Fri, 17 Jan 2014, Digimer wrote:
CentOS was never under any requirement to release their build methods. Whether that was a good or bad choice is not very relevant now.
I'd thought that the GPL's said differently.
From a subsequennt post, I gather that there
is disagreement on whether CentOS has done so.
On 1/17/2014 8:12 AM, IonPacepa wrote:
don't see how we benefit when a large company comes in and buys their way into the board and pays off all members. Where is the Community's say in this? This is a payoff. Will we get releases sooner? Will we know how to rebuild the build environment for ourselves? What if Redhat slowly makes using CentOS painful to incentivize using RHEL? If Redhat had good intentions why don't they give unsupported RHEL for free themselves. Granted the probably want to keep OEL and the like from being able to freely rebuild and plagiarize and charge money for their stuff, but we , the Community, the masses of users, are stuck now between behemoths and their lackeys taking payouts throwing us whatever table scraps they want and we are powerless to change this.
Sorry, could not resist...:-) reminds me of,
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
On 01/17/2014 10:12 AM, IonPacepa wrote:
I view this as a takeover. I view this as a few who kept how to rebuild RHEL a state secret benefiting financially. I don't see how a community benefits when we cannot recreate for ourselves what is being done here. I don't see how we benefit when a large company comes in and buys their way into the board and pays off all members. Where is the Community's say in this? This is a payoff. Will we get releases sooner? Will we know how to rebuild the build environment for ourselves? What if Redhat slowly makes using CentOS painful to incentivize using RHEL? If Redhat had good intentions why don't they give unsupported RHEL for free themselves. Granted the probably want to keep OEL and the like from being able to freely rebuild and plagiarize and charge money for their stuff, but we , the Community, the masses of users, are stuck now between behemoths and their lackeys taking payouts throwing us whatever table scraps they want and we are powerless to change this.
There is no makeworld or emerge world here, just binaries that magically get produced and peppered on an ftp whenever someone gets around to it.
And I view you as unbelievably dense ... how about you actually see something tangible actually CHANGE for the worse before you make your proclamations of the end of CentOS. When something happens that actually takes something away that is important, you can then come back and post about it. If a frog had wings it would not bump its ass on the ground when it jumped. That statement is as relevant as your proclamations of doom before anything has changed in any way.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with CentOS the base OS or any restrictions to or for anything ... it has to do with adding the ability for the community (Like Xen4, like RDO, like GlusterFS, like OpenStack Origin, like OpenNebula, like Ceph, like RackSpace, like <insert name here>, being able to start a community project, on OUR HARDWARE, and build things to use with CentOS by the community.
If the source code is available, any one can build it ... both Red Hat and CentOS already all the source code available. Every package that is changed in CentOS and every srpm (changed or not) is published. All it takes is time to build and compare and build again in the proper order.
Some things, like a dot zero (ie, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0) release take a lot of time to figure out the proper build order and mechanics .. which is why there is http://seven.centos.org/ . We (The CentOS Project) specifically went out and got permission to get this site up and discuss, from the beginning of the first beta release of rhel7b1, the ability to build this software. How to get it to build, what is required (rhel7b1, f19, other packages from rawhide, etc.). We are doing it in the public, publishing mock configs and everything else on git.centos.org:
https://git.centos.org/summary/sig-core!bld-seven.git
We will, it the coming weeks, publish our beanstalk client (nazar) and build system (reimzul) on that git site as you can see in:
https://git.centos.org/summary/centos-git-common.git
We could not possibly be more open than this.
In summary, opinions are like ... well, you know the rest. Opinions are a dime a dozen. Actions are relevant. Our actions show we want to continue to provide the best OS in the world to the community AND we want to also bring in many more members to make CentOS better than ever.
Take a look at the centos-devel mailing list at all the groups that want to start a new Special Interest Group:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2014-January/thread.html
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
Snip...
In summary, opinions are like ... well, you know the rest. Opinions are a dime a dozen. Actions are relevant. Our actions show we want to continue to provide the best OS in the world to the community AND we want to also bring in many more members to make CentOS better than ever.
--Snip
+1 from me I like the direction and the additional openness, I believe it is headed in a better direction, thanks for all the hard work!
:)
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Christopher Chan -
Digimer -
Edward M -
IonPacepa -
James Hogarth -
Johnny Hughes -
Michael Hennebry -
Tom Bishop