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

On 12/17/2020 12:03 AM, Simon Matter wrote:
>> 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 do wonder if there was some sort of generational change at root here 
that has not been made explicit. Or perhaps some underlying tribal 
knowledge about how OSS works that failed to get transmitted? It's easy 
to make assumptions that stability and ideology gets passed down 
automatically, but just like in real life it takes eternal vigilance to 
re-instill foundational concepts.

I refuse to believe RedHat itself has /actually/ been this myopic _this 
entire time_ about its relationship with the wider Enterprise Linux 
-derived community, and how this feeds back into revenue, stability, 
paid support, certifications, training, and the all-important 
"mindshare." Maybe that's just wishful thinking, though?


On 12/16/2020 4:17 PM, Mark Mielke wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 6:52 PM Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
>> I think many of you think that some implicit guarantee was made, or are applying some standard to CentOS similar to what you would a contractual agreement and those will never be the same thing.
> This isn't how Free / Open Source projects work. It is not normal for
> a community that exists precisely to provide a particular feature, is
> "acquired" by a company that claims to have the community interest at
> heart, and then leverages this power to replace the product with
> something that provides value to the company, and does not directly
> compete with company.
>
> I have no doubt of your sincerity. However, I also believe that you
> may have been surrounded by other people with similar conflicts of
> interest and created a sort of "echo chamber" that after several
> months made it seem entirely reasonable to do.
>
This reaction was entirely predictable... and I mean *entirely*. How in 
the world was this missed? Frankly, this would have hurt far less if 
this /had/ been blamed on IBM, and I'm rather shocked no one above the 
Board felt the need to push the hard call UP rather than scapegoat down. 
That could be the most tone-deaf thing going on here.

-jc

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