[CentOS-devel] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

Fri Dec 11 11:43:31 UTC 2020
Louis Lagendijk <louis at fazant.net>

On Thu, 2020-12-10 at 20:02 -0500, Konstantin Boyandin via CentOS-devel 
wrote:
> 
> 
> What's not nice is that CentOS community will inevitably be
> disrupted 
> and dispersed.
> 
> Unless the RH announcement was a shortsighted and dumb sacrifice to 
> Money, I assume they just brush away what they consider "unnecessary 
> expenses". In any case, I continue to evangelize open source, Linux 
> included, it's just CentOS and RH that won't be promoted (by me) any
> more.
> 
I interpret the Centos change of direction as indicative of the change
in direction for RedHat: RHEL has become much less important as IBM
focuses on web applications, cloud tooling etc. That is where the money
is and that is what they bought RedHat for. So RHEL has to optimize OS
costs as is it no longer key. So it is only logical to optimize the
development process and outsource some of the testing to the public in
Centos Stream, and not waste resources on a true free competitor for
RHEL. 

Now For Stream I am mainly worried about 2 things: 
1 - the kernel and its impact on drivers from Elrepo and other external
repos (OpenZFS!). Not important for RHEL, but important for people that
use old hardware that requires drivers not in RHEL.
2 - the frequency of updates from Centos stream, which will require 
much more frequent updates. As some updates will be security fixes
skipping frequent updates is not an option....

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.