[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the RHEL platform

On Monday, December 28, 2020 1:41 PM, Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at centosproject.org> wrote:

> On 12/28/20 8:04 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
>
> > On 12/28/20 5:14 AM, Laurențiu Păncescu wrote:
> >
> > > This started with RHEL 6, and the likely motivation was to hinder
> > > Oracle Enterprise Linux, not to save build time.
> >
> > That was speculation at the time of the change, and no evidence has ever
> > supported it.
>
> "No evidence" besides the official declaration published on the Red Hat
> Blog by Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO at the time:
>
> > Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL.
>
> > Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors, but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future.
>
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/commitment-to-open

Attempting this might have made business sense back in 2011.  But what it was supposed to accomplished has failed.

There was justifications given for leaving in place, but those justifications involved RHEL being the upstream provider.

We now have from Karsten Wade:
"Essentially, Red Hat is filling the development and contribution gap that exists between Fedora and RHEL by shifting the place of CentOS from just downstream of RHEL to just upstream of RHEL."

Leaving the obfuscated kernel SRPM in place suggests the governance board has tagged us upstream without giving us the authority that should come with it.  We are being put through the exercise of this "hard decision" so that Wade can apply his own twisted definition of "openness."

And where exactly is this Wade that would be available on the centos devel mailing list to discuss things further?

He has posted a total of four times to the mailing list.  His last post was a week ago with this fun little metaphor:

"Let's bring the elephant out of the room into the sunlight, I'm getting
tired of building better flashlights."

The CentOS governance had a stated obligation to be public, open and inclusive.  The fact a board member is even describing the situation in terms of flash lights on an elephant is an indication they have not lived up to that obligation at all.

Where is his follow-up post to bring the elephant into the sunlight?

Where is his stance on closing the openness gap by leaving the Stream kernel SRPM obfuscated for patches?

I further submit that the following governance board member have not posted to any CentOS mailing list over the entire year of 2020.  Under the concept of meritocracy, they do not have merit to be on the board as they aren't active members of the CentOS community.

These MIA governance board members are:
  Brian Exelbierd
  Mike McLean
  Carl Trieloff
  Rich Bowen

How do we initiate a vote of no confidence in these non-community board members?