[CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

On 12/15/20 10:29 AM, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
>
>
>     I'd also just add that while I find Johnny's characterization of
>     what happened accurate, Ljubomir took a couple of leaps that I
>     don't think existed.  Red Hat decided not to continue paying
>     actual money for what was actively harming us and no longer
>     providing the value that it once did.  No one, not even the board,
>     could force Red Hat to continue paying for this project which was
>     just not working for us.
>
>
> Thanks for admitting that the reason Red Hat did this was financial. 
> This BS about it being "a better way for Community input into RHEL" is 
> just that, BS.
>
> Can we stop with the charade that this is supposed to be a good thing 
> for the CentOS community? It's not. It was never intended to be. It's 
> a punishment for us getting "free Red Hat" all these years.


That is not a fair characterization of that decision.

Red Hat built up CentOS Stream as a stable LTS distribution.  At some 
point, a rational person looking at the use cases for CentOS Stream and 
CentOS would naturally ask if it makes sense to continue putting human 
work hours into producing CentOS when it's considerably more difficult 
due to trying to reproduce the exact state of RHEL's build roots through 
reverse engineering, and for that effort, it's worse for 99.(some number 
of nines)% of users. There are no security updates for at least two 
months a year, even when they're needed.  New features (rare as they 
are) roll out slower.  Support for new hardware rolls out slower.

The vast majority of self-supported deployments would be better off 
choosing CentOS Stream, and having both makes that a lot less clear.  
Producing CentOS is very expensive, and provides no value for the vast 
majority of users.  It provides no value to Red Hat, either.  And saying 
so doesn't mean that Red Hat is making a cash grab.

Time that engineers spend rebuilding CentOS is time that they aren't 
improving CentOS Stream.  (This is, very much, a zero-sum system.)  In 
other words, continuing to make CentOS is a missed opportunity to make 
CentOS Stream better, which would have made RHEL better, which would 
have made CentOS better.  That's what it means for CentOS to not work 
*for* Red Hat.  Red Hat can provide a better self-supported distribution 
by discontinuing effort on CentOS.

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