Hi Phil, Thanks for your thoughtful and thorough responses. From my perspective, Brendan is a great person to be speaking with here, I'm glad you're both engaging in this thread. I have a side point to address that comes up, about decision making in open source projects. It's a topic I didn't address directly in my blog post. On 12/20/20 5:01 PM, Phil Perry wrote: > It is > something I would have liked to have seen the CentOS board negotiate as > part of the discussions, but as these all occurred behind closed doors, > without any prior knowledge of or consultation with the community, it > was not possible to highlight such issues in advance or have any input > into those discussions. This is not a difficult thing for Red Hat to fix > if they have the will. Lets give the folks at Red Hat / CentOS time to > offer up some solutions. I appreciate you see more time is needed to come up with solutions. Frankly, bringing incomplete solutions to the community and wider user base is the intended and correct approach. For products and customers, there is an expectation of announcements and offerings being of a certain finish and polish. For open source projects, there has to be community input and wider feedback for solutions to end up actually working for people. It's an important part of how the innovation happens. Right here in this thread, we are doing the work to help create solutions, so thanks again to all. You reasonably ask why this couldn't have been done from the beginning as an open discussion, rather than springing a seemingly-disappointing surprise on people. My response is that a large portion of the discussion has been happening in the open regarding our plans for the Project and the distro once we all joined forces in 2014. For example: * There have been different "CentOS Distros" for almost seven years. * Plans for evolution were discussed openly and often; the conversations around the numbering scheme for CentOS Linux 7 were all about that. * Open build and CI/CD systems were put in place. * Layered projects were invited to own and maintain any change to the core distro and still call it "CentOS". * Visibility into the RHEL 8 build/rebuild showed where RHEL Engineering wanted to go with building and shipping the distro. * This is in addition to many other smaller communications, presentations, and so forth. During those seven years, if you spent time close to the Project, there was sometimes a cloud over a discussion, which was, "when is Red Hat going to drop the other shoe?"—the first shoe being the joining forces in 2014. I think there have never been any shoes being dropped. I think the core intention around solving the issues of open, available, sustainable, and stable-enough-for-different-use-cases is what this has been about since 31 October 1994. In January 2014 Red Hat acknowledged the world's association of the CentOS brand with Red Hat. Red Hat became the stewards of the brand, empowering the CentOS Board to take good care of that brand out here in the day-to-day. In all of that, we have conducted as much of the discussions and decision making in the open, communal spaces as possible at the time. But there are also discussions and decisions to have in private business space. That is the nature of business. Red Hat (as a business) invited the non-Red Hat and non-managers who are Board Directors to have discussions about RHEL Engineering development, business, and resource plans for the coming years. The conversations contained non-public topics. The result of those discussions is where we are today. We announced to begin having open conversations as soon as we could, thanks to the help of a lot of people. If it could have been one minute sooner or have included one other deserving contributor in those discussions, we would have done so. We have all trusted the code over the years and the people in the CentOS Project and Red Hat to give us a Linux that is quite good enough for our needs. In making decisions, the Board have listened to and choosen to trust the Red Hatters who brought their requests to us. Similarly, we all trust the Linux kernel developers with our lives and livelihood. I wrote near the top "seemingly-disappointing surprise", and I want to acknowledge while there is a very real disappointment people feel, the question is still open if this news turns out to be disappointing by the time Dec 2021 arrives. The major difference for me in terms of "can we make a CentOS distro that is open/available/sustainable/stable-enough" is that for the first time since before 2003, Red Hat Engineering have the community distro (CentOS Stream now, Red Hat Linux back then) as a top-line priority. That is why I am so hopeful this can succeed for all of us. Best regards, - Karsten -- Karsten Wade [he/him/his]| Senior Community Architect | @quaid Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO) : @redhatopen https://community.redhat.com | https://next.redhat.com | https://osci.io https://theopensourceway.org | https://github.com/theopensourceway/guide