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

Sat Dec 19 10:24:01 UTC 2020
Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at centosproject.org>

On 12/18/20 9:03 PM, Jean-Marc Liger wrote:
> It's sad to say, but CentOS-devel mailing list was more intersting 
> without some Red Hat proud boys.
I was just a small-time contributor to CentOS (maintaining the Vagrant 
images for 6 and 7), and I'm sad to see it go - sad, not angry. Seeing 
the discussion degenerate in personal attacks makes me even sadder. 
Disclosure: I do not, and never did work for Red Hat.

Your email address is from a French domain - I would like to believe you 
were not aware the "proud boys" is the name of a neo-fascist 
organization based in the USA, which was quite a few times in the US 
news recently.[1] That kind of comment crosses a line for me, no matter 
what Mr. McGrath might have decided or written above.

For people that never heard of Mike McGrath, he was the founder and 
architect of OpenShift, and, according to his LinkedIn page, corporate 
vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat and management lead for 
RHEL8. I don't know him personally, but, management position aside, I 
think he probably is an intelligent and technologically apt person, who 
deserves more respect than invoking Godwin's law.[2] I'm also not sure 
how many upper managers at other companies would have spent many hours 
since the announcement on IRC and this mailing list, only to be 
(sometimes) shouted at and insulted. Mr. McGrath, in case you're reading 
this, sad as I am to see CentOS Linux go, many thanks for the years of 
financial and engineering support that Red Hat donated to the CentOS 
Project. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to Karanbir, 
Fabian and Brian, who have helped me all these years.

CentOS Stream might be great even for some productions roles, time will 
tell. It's definitely not a substitute for people needing 10 years of 
support or binary compatibility with RHEL (especially for expensive, 
proprietary hardware, whose vendors only support RHEL). I would have 
found it better if Red Hat did this before CentOS Linux 8 was released, 
or at least to have communicated openly that they are considering 
sunsetting it, but that doesn't change the reality: CentOS Linux, as we 
knew it and loved it, is dead, and we'll have to migrate to one of 
several RHEL rebuilds (OEL and Springdale were available for years, and 
Red Hat will continue to publish sources), or to some other LTS distro.

Best wishes,
Laurențiu

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law