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

Japheth Cleaver

cleaver at terabithia.org
Thu Dec 17 14:13:31 UTC 2020


On 12/17/2020 5:06 AM, Yedidyah Bar David wrote:
> Re the CentOS_brand_: People keep saying: OK, you realized that
> taking over CentOS was a mistake. Fine. Just give it back to the
> community. Now, let's have an exercise. Red Hat claims that CentOS
> costs it money. A lot of money. And that if CentOS Linux would
> continue as-is, even without Red Hat's financing, it would still
> cost it quite a lot of money. See the linked article at start of
> this thread, and other stuff here, for details. But it's not
> important if you accept this fact as presented or not. Just accept
> that this is Red Hat's stand - that CentOS Linux will continue
> costing it money, as-is. Now, suppose that Red Hat, expecting the
> huge noise/backlash such an announcement would cause, would simply
> quitely try to find contributions somewhere and keep the project
> as-is. Would this help covering these costs? Would a thread like
> current exist? Would people seriously start thinking about what
> it means to have something like CentOS Linux? How much it costs?
> etc.? I do not think so.

> So Red Hat decided it's best for
> everyone to simply publicly kill it. To make it extremely clear
> that Red Hat is not involved anymore in any RHEL rebuilds. That
> from Red Hat's POV, if you want CentOS Stream, as presented, you
> are most welcome to try it, that if you want RHEL, you have
> several options for getting it, but that if you want a RHEL
> rebuild, then CentOS isn't one, and Red Hat is not going to be
> involved in one. That if anyone wants to make one, fine - but
> Red Hat is not part of that.

I think this supposition undervalues the awareness of the folks on this 
list, or who have been a part of this industry for a long time.

RedHat is a for-profit company, borne from a foundation of open-source. 
Most of the users are also for-profit companies of one type or another. 
One for-profit company is not going to simply "donate" to another one 
without some sort of return, even if it isn't a great one. But everyone 
in the OSS community who's been here for a while is well aware of the 
communal challenges around free-ridership. The relationship between 
RHL/RHEL and rebuilds is _not_ the same relationship as between, say, 
software companies and Amazon selling it as a service. As others have 
said on this thread, they've worked hard to FIND WAYS to throw money at 
RedHat to help ensure stability, development, and resources continue, 
and RedHat itself has rebuffed them or been non-responsive.

Had RedHat said "Real Talk: Running CentOS is expensive and we need a 
better way to justify this or get support for non-revenue operations 
more broadly", there are people on this list who would have jumped. 
There are multi-billion dollar companies that prize stability but could 
not internally justify a switch to all-RHEL pricing, given that rebuilds 
operated with a level of risk that was acceptable to them (or, more 
likely, acceptable to their sysadmin and linux engineering teams). If 
you're paying 20-25 senior Linux engineers, moving from OSS to a 
commercial framework is a tough sell. A common-good/private-profit 
synergy where support contracts were paired with contributions earmarked 
for CentOS operations and associated PR boosts would have been a 
no-brainer, and that synergy was what was implied in 2014. The 
expectation was that if your quasi-official rebuild project was in 
danger of closing up, there would have been outreach. There wasn't. This 
came out of the blue for anyone outside the bubble.

> People on
> this thread keep saying two opposite, contradicting things: One,
> that CentOS, as a name, is worth almost nothing - say, not much
> more than the cost of keeping the domain name centos.org, and
> the other, that CentOS is a huge thing, and that killing it
> as-is is a huge crime. Please be honest. If you think the former,
> what's the problem? Just create a new cool name, and start
> collecting people to join you. If you think the latter, please
> realize that this costs money - a lot - and that Red Hat decided
> that it does not want to spend this money anymore. I personally
> think that's fair.

The fact that CentOS Linux was *not* spun off -- not allowed a chance to 
solicit funding directly, years after the funding problems from before 
-- but was, in fact "killed" is precisely the sign that this was about 
RedHat punishing the rebuild userbase, and not out of any sort of desire 
to maintain symbiosis with the (much larger) EL-derivative community or 
develop further ways to improve the balance sheets of both RHEL and the 
CentOS sides of the house.

> Of course!
>
> As other, more senior Red Hatters already said on this thread: Game on.
>
> We do not look for mercy. We think we are good. If you prefer doing
> business with Oracle, or CloudLinux, or a (new) company behind Rocky
> Linux - go ahead.
>
If CentOS needed a row of hardware to continue functioning (or it would 
die), there would have been donations. But when a new Vice-President 
comes on the list and throws it back at the post-2014 not meeting 
expectations that clearly were not indicated (and, in fact, were the 
polar opposite of what a downstream support distribution is intended to 
be), you're seeing more and more goodwill drying up. The other 
EL-derivatives *also* didn't operate for-profit, and closed down 
operations because they trusted that RH was doing the right thing. 
Clearly that trust, that RH would be the grownups here, was severely 
misplaced. EL-users have invested significant time and energy in the RH 
ecosystem, and we don't really *need* competing rebuild projects, which 
all, by definition, are trying to do nearly identical things.

The direct revenue to RHEL is not changing overnight. No one on this 
list *wants* to do business with Oracle, and no one wants to be enemies 
with RedHat. But leadership has needlessly created a hostile environment 
(not just a cool one, or a post-amicable-divorce one, but a /hostile/ 
one) from a merciful one.

It's baffling.

-jc

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/attachments/20201217/ee513f70/attachment.html>


More information about the CentOS-devel mailing list