[CentOS-devel] Vote of Confidence

On Sat, Jan 02, 2021 at 11:51:35PM -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
> It is the charade of it all that is the most frustrating. For example,
> saying that it is "upstream" so this will facilitate contribution, but
> then admitting that actually Red Hat is still the upstream, and Red
> Hat will make all the decisions on what content and direction is
> allowed. At least Fedora has some ability to choose a different path,
> like BTRFS as one example. Will CentOS Stream community members be
> permitted to add BTRFS back into CentOS Stream? Or will Red Hat
> prevent such a thing?

It's not a "charade". You don't have to believe it, but everything we're
saying is sincere.

"Upstream" doesn't necessarily mean "community controlled upstream". This is
common in a lot of open source projects with corporate backing. (I think
Fedora is pretty special in this regard.) But it does mean that it's open to
the community for feedback in the ways that have been described, in a way
which is a clear improvement from the previous internal-only structure.

The original CentOS stream announcement used the term "midstream", which I
like, but I also understand that introducing new terminology can create
problems of its own. That announcement is also clear about the contribution
model for Stream — transparent but ultimately Red Hat decisions.
Characterizing further explanations of this as some kind of gotcha
"admitting" isn't fair.

As for BTRFS, I'm sure this has already been answered, but I'll say it
again: Red Hat is definitely not at this time interested in BTRFS for RHEL,
therefore unless Red Hat engineer and business minds are changed, that's not
going to happen in CentOS Stream. However, a CentOS SIG which adds BTRFS
would be very welcome.

And, honestly, putting my Fedora hat back on, this makes perfect sense. We
already _have_ the Fedora Project. We don't need a second, overlapping one.
If you want to work directly on operating system design, come join us over
in Fedora. If you want to help guide Red Hat's decisions for RHEL minor
releases, if you want early access to that development, if you want to build
alternate ideas on that base, you're already in the right place.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader