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

Simon Matter

simon.matter at invoca.ch
Thu Dec 17 08:03:28 UTC 2020


> Le 16/12/2020 à 12:35, Jim Jagielski a écrit :
>
>>> On Dec 15, 2020, at 10:07 PM, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 12/15/20 1:03 PM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
>>>> 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).
>>>> 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.
>>> It is actually just as Jason Brooks has spelled out—we needed a
>>> slower-moving platform for our layered projects success. CentOS Linux
>>> was our best bet in 2013, when projects like OpenStack (RDO) and oVirt
>>> were growing and running into pains.
>>>
>> Again, the main concern was that with such layered products, it was
>> deemed better if instead of people using Canonical, they stayed in the
>> RedHat family, and officially having CentOS supported as a RedHat
>> "effort" was the solution.
>>
>> Yes, people were not going to run OpenStack (or OpenShift) on Fedora,
>> nor did it make sense to try to fold those directly into RHEL. CentOS
>> was the "perfect" solution. The goal of SIGs was to determine what
>> layered products, and in what format, people wanted. But the idea that
>> CentOS was intended to be a 50/50 bidirectional codebase is simply
>> rewriting history. The claim that the CentOS community never changed
>> from what it was, and what RedHat *knew* it was, and what RedHat over
>> the years (at least publicly) constantly indicated they were 100% happy
>> about (That CentOS was a community of *users*) just seems like after the
>> fact justification, with the sole intent of placing the blame ON CENTOS.
>
>
> It now seems crystal clear Red Hat purchased CentOS 6 years ago as it
> was the best OpenStack infrastructure for their purpose. And the best
> value of this CentOS - Red Hat joint effort was not the binary rebuild
> of RHEL, but all the additionnal SIGs provided with CentOS 7.
>
> With Red Hat now focused on OpenShift, this golden age as ended and
> CentOS Linux wasn't necessary in the suitable form it had always been
> for years. This turned in a way that betrayed all the Red Hat promises,
> the Community Entreprise OS was first and only interested for.
>
> As in 2003 where Red Hat was the leading distro in the Linux World, the
> trust has been broken again and many will flee to Debian or Ubuntu LTS,

Now that you mention 2003, I remember that time and one thing became clear
to me. This new direction with CentOS is most likely inspired from the top
of RedHat. It can only happen with the support of the top management and
it is, if you ask me, inspired by the same people who decided the things
back in 2003. Unfortunately they seem to have missed to realize the
reasons why things have worked back then.

I know that Red Hat was and is free to decide what they want. But I can
assure you that the only reason why quite a number RHEL subscriptions have
been sold to the companies where I have worked in the past is that there
was a project called CentOS! That was the reason why I didn't move to
Debian or something else and I was the person who brought Linux into the
companies, where they had everything from Windows Server to Novell Netware
to different UNIX systems but no Linux.

Regards,
Simon



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