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

Wed Dec 16 23:51:44 UTC 2020
Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com>

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 5:12 PM Julien Pivotto <roidelapluie at inuits.eu>
wrote:

> On 16 Dec 17:08, Mike McGrath wrote:
> >
> > It makes a lot of sense that people would be upset about this.  We very
> > much should have set better expectations at the launch of CentOS 8 but at
> > that point no specific dates around CentOS8 had been decided other than
> to
> > release it.
>
> Mike,
>
> Somehow it ended up on https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product , so
> someone took the decision to write it here.
>
>
Yes, I'm going to explain what happened as I've covered on IRC.

First, we didn't say anything about the EOL date because we didn't have an
agreement at that time and that's the screwup.  That absolutely could have
been handled better.

What happened after that was a community member, not knowing any
differently edited the wiki with a date that everyone thought was the right
date.  This was not an unreasonable thing for them to do.  Any other date
written after that probably got it from the wiki.

I think many of you think that some implicit guarantee was made, or are
applying some standard to CentOS similar to what you would a contractual
agreement and those will never be the same thing.

I think Red Hat did everything we could to stress that this rebuild was
community supported and best effort.  Anyone mixing "free" and "enterprise"
at work need to accept any risks that come along with that, I always did
when I ran CentOS in production.  Even with all of that, we gave a year's
notice for 8 and let 7 continue in its natural life.  We provided a viable
(but not identical) alternative, and are working to find ways too get free
RHEL to people.  We're going to stand by that all of that, why?  Because at
the end of the day, any comparisons to us and Oracle, or "Embrace, Extend,
Extinguish" are unfounded.  We made a very unpopular decision here, I get
that.  But the difference is while we stand by that decision we actually do
care about the impact it has had and are trying to make it right with many
of you.

This is a good time to remind people of part of Chris Wright's announcement
<https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux>
and centos-questions at redhat.com.  This is a mailing list (not a sales lead
generator).  If you're using CentOS Linux today, and feel you cannot use
stream.  Email us and tell us why.  The people who are creating new free
and low-cost RHEL programs want to hear from you.  We don't know who you
are.  And even if you are a Red Hat customer, previously you likely hid
your CentOS deployments from us and so we don't know about them.  And I
repeat: this isn't going to our sales team, they don't have access to this
list, this is about making sure we structure our future RHEL programs
correctly.

           -Mike


> --
> Julien Pivotto
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