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

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 1:03 PM Jim Jagielski <jim at jimjag.com> wrote:
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> > On Dec 15, 2020, at 3:50 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
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> > You may not like it, but the CentOS community didn't evolve in any way with the industry.  When I think about the talent on this list, and in IRC, I can't help but wonder what went wrong.  For whatever reason, CentOS never grew beyond a community of users
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> Whose fault is that? And, to be honest, I never recall such an expectation ever being vocalized during my tenure @ RedHat (FTR: I was one of the people inside OSAS who drove the CentOS "acquisition" along w/ Carl Trieloff)
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> The whole intent back then was "as long as there is going to be this huge community of 'free-loading' users out there, they might as well be under the RHEL/Fedora umbrella, rather than Canonical or elsewhere." I guess somewhere along the line that changed. The issue isn't that the situation changed but rather that up until very recently, promises were still being made and then RedHat backed out of those promises.
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No. I was on that team too, and growing CentOS beyond just consumption
and into contribution was something we emphasized throughout. Our
primary intent, the reason the whole thing got started, was that we
needed to provide our layered projects with a slow-moving community
distro to layer atop. That's why we put so much effort into the SIGs,
and into opening up the build processes and tools. Even with that work
done, until we opened up RHEL development itself, contributions to the
core of CentOS were basically blocked. Now, in addition to the layered
project need, which hasn't gone away, we need a distro to open up RHEL
development, and CentOS Stream is that distro.

I know that "same package set that RH ships to customers" has been an
effective shorthand for "good enough for me," and that our assurances
of trusting the automated ci and the power of community collaboration
may be inspiring less trust right now, but I am confident that CentOS
Stream will be a good, stable distro for current users. My team that
hosts infra for various open source projects has already begun
converting some of our production services from CentOS 8 to CentOS
Stream.


-- 
Jason Brooks
He/Him
Manager, Community Architects & Infrastructure
Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO)
https://community.redhat.com | https://osci.io