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

Simon Matter

simon.matter at invoca.ch
Sun Dec 27 08:59:47 UTC 2020


> On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 4:12 PM Chris Mair <chris at 1006.org> wrote:
>
>> > But as a business, since you're not providing
>> > Red Hat with profit (none of our communities are), what are you
>> providing
>> > that would result in continued sponsorship of a downstream rebuild?
>>
>> Installation count share?
>>
>> Without CenOS Linux you'll look at 1% of Linux servers running RHEL (I'm
>> sure
>> you have a more precise number, and I'm sure it will be as
>> embarrassing...).
>>
>> In a world without CentOS Linux why should I pay for RH courses? Why
>> should I
>> renew my RHCE? Why should educators choose such a rare distribution
>> to teach Linux? At this point why not go with Ubuntu? Debian? Why teach
>> yum/dnf when most servers will use apt?
>>
>>
> This one is interesting and one we discussed in length.  Unfortunately, if
> you look at any "top" list.  Ubuntu is clumped together, and Red Hat gets
> broken out into Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS.  As for why educators would pick
> a "rare" distribution, because we're going to have a program that caters
> directly to education.
>

That's exactly what Google, Apple and Microsoft do - and I absolutely do
not like it and do not support any such company and teach my kids to stay
away as far as they can and also explain them why.

>
>> You say us (the community) isn't providing you (Red Hat) with profit.
>> Well,
>> who do you think installed CentOS Linux and recommended RHEL to our
>> pointy
>> haired bosses that wanted support contracts?
>>
>> Maybe you sold 1 RHEL subscription for any 100 CentOS we installed.
>>
>> Well, now you're going to sell exactly 0 RHEL subscriptions for any of
>> the
>> 100 Ubuntu or Debian boxes I'm going to set up with my clients.
>>
>>
> Unfortunately with these last ones we've seen no evidence of this
> happening
> (where CentOS is actually leading to RHEL sales.  We have seen a little
> evidence of the opposite.  Where we once had RHEL sales, and now have
> CentOS.  Why?  "They're both built by Red Hat, right?"
>

At least for my environments in the last two decades I can tell you you
are completely wrong here. And you can not know it because nobody who
bought RedHat because of me told you so. They just ordered servers from
$VENDOR with bundled RH subscriptions and renewed them together with all
other software.

>
>> Before you say "Stream", the single most killer argument against Stream
>> is that you have broken any trust when you moved the EOL of CentOS Linux
>> 8
>> from 2029 to 2021.
>>
>>
> I think we lost a lot of trust due to a pretty serious mix-up about the
> EOL
> date announcement, but I don't think it has erased all the good Red Hat
> has
> done and continues to do.
>
>
> Now Red Hat employees jump through hoops to tell us how great that'll be.
>> What
>> guerantees that in two year's time you're not going to kill Stream
>> because
>> "it didn't
>> provide anything to RH"?
>>
>>
> Nothing, we and all companies kill products all the time.  I don't recall
> this level of outrage over mugshot.  We're taking a big risk with Stream
> and if it doesn't work out, we'll make changes there too as we should.  It
> makes no sense to continue doing something that isn't working out.
>
>

Maybe this is the biggest point: we just couldn't believe RedHat is like
"all companies" :(

Regards,
Simon

>
>> Somebody already mentioned "fool me once..."...
>>
>> I'm still angry and I still cannot believe you appear to be oblivious to
>> the huge
>> blunder you made with this incredible EOL shortening. You've basically
>> killed the
>> CentOS brand in one single move.
>>
>>
> We're not oblivious to it.  If this were any other organization or
> relationship, we'd help make amends by giving you your money back.  That's
> just not an option here.  And you can say we killed it all you want, what
> we've done is significantly change it.  You may not recognize it anymore
> but there are many people on this list who we talked to before the
> announcement and that we've seen now who are actually interested in coming
> on this journey with us.  Thats good.
>
> I suspect the very trust that you all were putting in Red Hat to continue
> to produce CentOS Linux as though it were actually a 10-year
> enterprise-grade distribution for production was part of the problem here.
> To further demonstrate that problem, many of the replies I've seen look as
> though people did their risk assessments with "we're relying on Red Hat
> for
> our OS" instead of "We're relying on a community for our OS."  I'd imagine
> some of you are having very awkward conversations with your management
> chain about this.  No one using Fedora or WildFly thinks that way.
>
> We wanted CentOS to flourish in development environments, in upstream Open
> Source CI, and to help with things like OpenStack.  I'm not sure if we
> accomplished any of that.  For those that think perhaps that was the
> mistake all those years ago, I personally agree with you.
>
>             -Mike
>
>
>> Bye,
>> Chris.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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