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

On 15/12/2020 17:59, Mike McGrath 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.  I'm not 
> going to say that the announcement was the board's idea or even that 
> they were happy about it.  I think the previous course and speed of 
> CentOS was well understood.  But that no longer worked for Red Hat who 
> is paying for people, servers, swag, etc.  The list goes on.

Thank you for this clarification although it was fairly apparent to 
everyone what the driver was behind this change.

I'd like to thank Red Hat for supporting the CentOS Project from 2014 to 
2020. You did a good thing by stepping in to save the project from 
disintegration back in 2014. Thanks for that, CentOS would probably have 
survived without you but you did the right thing and stepped up when you 
were needed.

However...

While Red Hat may *legally* own the CentOS Project, I do not believe you 
are *morally* entitled to do what you have done. CentOS is not just 
about the project and the contributors to it. It's more than that. It 
has millions of users, so many that no-one really knows how many there 
are. Lots of those users may be large corporations "freeloading" as Red 
Hat probably see it but others, those are small users running single 
machines or just a few. Those users are *your* future.

You (Red Hat) made a  lot of promises both in 2014 and as late as last 
year when Chris Wright said something along the lines of classic CentOS 
Linux is not going anywhere. It's all very well to say that things 
change, well of course they do, but when they do, you have an obligation 
to live up to your promises and the recent actions were in no way doing 
that.

I believe the correct action for Red Hat to have taken would have been 
to say "we have decided that we no longer wish to fund the CentOS 
Project as it no longer aligns with our business purposes. So, in order 
not to let down the millions of users of CentOS Linux, we have decided 
to set up a foundation and donate the trade marks and domain names (that 
we acquired for almost nothing)".

With a decent legal founding, you could have made it takeover proof so 
that none of your competitors could acquire it. You could have done this 
and asked a number of the larger companies that have CentOS as part of 
their portfolio to sponsor the foundation - the Googles/AWS/OVH/cpanel's 
of this world could easily have stepped up and funded a FTE or 2 by 
donating to the foundation and you could have transferred some or all of 
the existing people who work on CentOS to that foundation and let *them* 
run it. Those hosting companies spin up new CentOS instances all the 
time and a cent or two donation on each instance would most likely fund 
most of what's required. And the people who are now scrambling around 
attempting to set up new hardware and build environments, they could be 
supporting the CentOS Linux Foundation instead.

The fact that you decided to take CentOS Linux out the back and shoot it 
in the head is a betrayal of your company's promises over the last 6 or 
7 years. It's exactly what everyone was afraid of when Red Hat took over 
CentOS in 2014 and despite numerous questions, you all said "no no, it's 
safe with us". Some of us remember those days and arguing with people 
about whether it was a good thing or not and a lot of us said "Trust Red 
Hat, see what they do, look at their actions not their words". Well we did.

You should rename CentOS Stream to Red Hat Stream Linux (RHSL) and 
remove CentOS from the Red Hat family altogether. Donate the trade marks 
and logos and domain names and the tooling needed to produce CentOS 
Linux. Set up a foundation. Get the big players who offer CentOS to 
users to help fund the foundation. Ask the employees who work on CentOS 
on a daily basis if they'd like to stay with Red Hat or transfer to the 
new foundation. Find some way in which users can contribute to the 
foundation and ensure its future.

It's not too late to do the right thing. Red Hat can still back off this 
betrayal of the community that use CentOS Linux and set CentOS Linux free.

You can say that you think people are coming round to this. I do not 
agree. I have read all of the feedback on IRC, all of the feedback on 
the CentOS forums, all the feedback on the mailing lists. This is *not* 
a popular change. It's tarnishing and poisoning Red Hat's reputation and 
until it's addressed it will continue to do so. You can help to fix this 
before Red Hat becomes tarred with the same brush as that other big 
company with the big red logo and the not so great reputation. This is 
NOT just a $$$ decision, it has other ramifications and right now, Red 
Hat are the bad guys and will remain so until this is addressed.

You can hope it'll go away but it won't. Red Hat will always be the 
company that broke its promises and killed CentOS Linux.


Trevor Hemsley

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