[CentOS-devel] Vote of Confidence

On Saturday, January 2, 2021 2:35 AM, Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com> wrote:

> Personally, I never joined a "stream" community. It could be
> worthwhile, but it's an entirely new thing that only looks like the
> previous thing. This makes it an open question as to who will join
> this new community. Clearly, the paid Red Hat staff will join. Also,
> several upstream maintainers of components that need to integrate with
> EL will join. But, will the EL user community join? I think depends
> upon requirements, and generally the answer will be no, they will not
> join.
>
> The community as we know it already moved to other places like Rocky.
> And, it's a pretty great community by all appearances. It is what
> CentOS should have become in 2014, but put on hold for 6 years, until
> forced to unite by a vendor that claimed "CentOS" for their own
> purposes.

I think this is the point at which we differ.

I want Stream to mean something.  I want to believe they are willing to work with the community such that community involvement would mean something.  I would never use Stream as a replacement for CentOS 8 but I would run it and submit bug reports if Red Hat still valued the community.

If KS got on the mailing list and said he wants to retire from doing a downstream clone of Red Hat.  Then continued on to say out of the 13,000+ employees of Red Hat, they are all too busy to also do it.  But if the community wants to step forward to do a CentOS 8 SIG to keep it going, it is up to the community to do so.  The hand-off to a SIG will take place at the end of 2021 or CentOS 8 will go end of life.  If that is what happened then I would understand that.

Instead, they kept ignoring requests from the community to allow them to get involved.  They gave non-community members preferential picks for being on the governance board just for being Red Hat employees.  They waited an entire month after voting to announce anything publicly.  And they indicated that since they trademarked CentOS, it doesn't matter who in the community is willing to do the work they will make sure nothing can legally be called CentOS 8 in 2022.

You don't stab someone in the back and then say immediately say that is in the past and ask what would they like to do with their life in the future.  That makes no sense.

The most ironic thing is the claims that IBM somehow had something to do with this.  I got to talk to members of the AIX team about why they selected to put the "L" in "AIX 5L."  I was told that IBM recognized that the fragmentation of UNIX had hurt AIX adoption and they wanted to change things to fix that.

I believe the AIX team would cringe at Red Hat's behavior.  Red Hat is willfully fragmenting the CentOS community.