On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 2:03 PM Japheth Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org> wrote: > On 12/15/2020 11:02 AM, Mike McGrath wrote: > > > On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 12:30 PM Phelps, Matthew <mphelps at cfa.harvard.edu> > wrote: > >> >> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 1:00 PM Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> I'd also just add that while I find Johnny's characterization of what >>> happened accurate, Ljubomir took a couple of leaps that I don't think >>> existed. Red Hat decided not to continue paying actual money for what was >>> actively harming us and no longer providing the value that it once did. No >>> one, not even the board, could force Red Hat to continue paying for this >>> project which was just not working for us. >>> >> >> Thanks for admitting that the reason Red Hat did this was financial. This >> BS about it being "a better way for Community input into RHEL" is just >> that, BS. >> >> > Ah, actually I didn't do that. RHEL is and has been doing fine. Don't > confuse "value" with revenue. CentOS Linux no longer served any purpose at > Red Hat and I'll flip it back around as I did in the previous email. > > Why should Red Hat, or any company, continue to pay for something that > isn't working out? > > If RedHat needed to justify or clarify the investment it was making in > CentOS -- as a reminder: *after* taking the independent project under its > wing and letting others snuff themselves out as superfluous -- then the > professional thing to do would have been to go to the larger community > about it. > > Present options, such as the rebuild being spun back out. Or discuss > mechanisms for increasing CentOS->RHEL conversions. Or solicit direct > funding options to get free-riders to contribute directly to CentOS Project > expenses while still keeping a firewall in place. > > > > >> Can we stop with the charade that this is supposed to be a good thing for >> the CentOS community? It's not. It was never intended to be. It's a >> punishment for us getting "free Red Hat" all these years. >> >> > I don't think anyone's said that. This is a massive change and disruption > for the existing CentOS community. 90% of the community (by our estimates) > will be able to stay on CentOS 7 until 2024 just as they expected. We made > sure the 10% on CentOS Linux 8 didn't continue to grow (thus trying to > minimize impact). We aren't punishing anyone and the fact that two other > clones have already popped up is a testament to that. > > No, the fact that two other clones have popped up is a testament to OSS > communities' ability to cope with events. The unexpected churn from having > the distro pulled out is absolutely a punishment because it creates a great > deal of work for all of us to return to the operational status quo with no > real benefit. > > *Direct question: If the CentOS Project (via the Board), secures funding > for expenses relating to the rebuild, does it get to continue CentOS Linux?* > > > Direct answer: Red Hat is out of the downstream building business. None of our other products have a downstream build sponsored by Red Hat, RHEL won't either. The cost was only one of many considerations here. -Mike > > >> Well, you all see the reaction this has garnered around the world, and >> it's all negative except for the Red Hat employees trying to convince us >> it's a good thing. Nice try. >> >> > Actually, things took an interesting turn around Thursday. Once people > understood what we actually announced much of the press has been very > positive, and now that the shock has worn off, we're seeing quite a lot of > support. > > "What you actually announced" was that CentOS+CR was going to be used > internally for testing against future minor releases, and that any ideal of > a binary-compatible rebuild was going away. > > I'm sure there's support from internal RH teams that for some reason > didn't have access to internal RHEL minor release betas. I can't imagine > who else this benefits in any way shape or form (except Oracle, Amazon, and > promoters of Debian-derived distributions). > > "RedHat EL Stream" is a useful thing, and whether that's a Preview > (post-QA), a Beta (intra-QA), or Rawhide (pre-QA), there's a place for it > as an official way to provide feedback. But it's entirely orthogonal from > the "North American Enterprise Linux Vendor" rebuild project. > > > > > We all know differently. And we are all now making influential choices >> that will hurt Red Hat. >> >> > I don't mean to sound cold here but if you really want to talk about the > business side of this.... If you don't have a budget and don't end up > finding a home in our coming low-cost or free offerings (Fedora, CentOS > Stream, UBI, or RHEL for developers, CI, Open Source, edu, mom/pop shops, > etc). Then what choices are you talking about? > > Anyone even tangentally associated with OSS is aware of the free rider > problem. As written above, there were plenty of ways to approach this > without forcing CentOS Linux to be canned prematurely in the middle of a > major release support cycle, immediately after EL6 had gone EOL, and after > RedHat's entry had seemingly removed the need for other projects to > continue operations. Frankly, the lack of goodwill demonstrated here places > both "free" RHEL and UBI into suspect categories. > > > -jc > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/attachments/20201215/eb787b82/attachment-0005.html>