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

Sun Dec 20 14:08:20 UTC 2020
Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch>

>
> It will just be a terrible shame. None of us wants to see this. We
> want Red Hat to be the unifying force. We want to help Red Hat. But,
> if Red Hat doesn't want us around any more - it will be more like a
> break up with a first girlfriend. Life goes on.
>
> It's up to you, CentOS/RHEL. You basically have these choices:
>
> 1. CentOS 8 stays, and "EL" distributions use CentOS 8 as a common
> baseline.
>
> 2. RHEL 8, including minor releases, stays accessible in source form,
> so that the community can build a clone that aligns with RHEL 8 for
> the purposes of *standards*, not for the purpose of *cheap*.
>
> 3. RHEL 8 hides the source behind a legal framework that makes it
> difficult or impossible for "bug-for-bug" compatibility to be
> maintained. Either the community reverse engineers this (for example,
> OpenJDK 8 is kind of like this), or the community creates its own
> baselines and ignores RHEL. RHEL becomes irrelevant.
>

For some days now I was thinking exactly about this:

What is Red Hat going to do to stop rebuilders like Oracle in future?

I mean, it doesn't make sense at all to stop CentOS Linux, whose users are
for sure the most loyal to Red Hat, and let the big profit makers like
Oracle go on and even help them to improve their profits.

So, what are you, Red Hat, going to do to prevent this?

I'm sure you have plans and I'm interested to hear how these plans look like.

I'm really sure Red Hat has to stop rebuilders somehow, otherwise a large
number of CentOS Linux users will just move on to another clone and nobody
will use CentOS Stream in the end. That would be a real lose-lose
situation.

Regards,
Simon