On Wed, Dec 9, 2020, 16:51 Joshua Kramer <joskra42.list at gmail.com> wrote: > Hello All- > > After reading and digesting a ton of community chatter about the > recent CentOS announcement I've come to the conclusion that there's a > lot of good about this, but there are also a lot of concerns that are > being ignored. And nobody so far has stared directly into the eyes of > the elephant in the room. So here goes. > > The Good: From a technical perspective- both in the sense of "getting > newer software" and "technical community being more involved in > bugfixes, etc"- having *a version* of CentOS called "AppStream" is > fantastic. The various RedHat and CentOS folks who have been extolling > these virtues in blog posts and twitter feeds are right-on. But from > responses I've seen, it appears to me that they think that these > virtues are enough to completely gloss over the complete and utter > clusterfrackas they've caused. > > The Bad: No point releases. There is POSITIVELY NO* REASON that they > can't have AppSream and still do point releases. Brand new stuff > would go into AppStream, at some point they do a point release of > RHEL, then follow the normal CentOS procedure to spin a CentOS build > of that point release. This is already a tried and true process. It > will cost RedHat all of what, low five digits (if that) in developer > salary to do this. Heck I'm sure some volunteers would step up to use > the existing infrastructure if RedHat didn't want to spend any paid > developer time on this. > > The Ugly: I denoted "NO* REASON" above because there actually *are* > reasons that we are not privy to. > https://twitter.com/JoshuaPKr/status/1336744681716244480 Since RedHat > is not being transparent with this, we are forced to speculate and > remain bewildered at why they would make a decision that is going to > cost them so much in the long run. The most common (and most likely) > theory is that some MBA somewhere in middle management saw all of this > CentOS being used in production environments (and otherwise downloaded > for free), and had the idea that if CentOS had its head cut off people > would just buy RHEL subscriptions. > > That may happen in a few cases, but for the most part, that is NOT > what is going to happen. By handling the CentOS situation in this > way, RedHat has branded itself as a company that acts in bad faith. If > a company acts in bad faith towards a community where non-monetary > value is exchanged, WHY would you trust that company to hold up its > obligations for contracts that are actually paid? People are going to > do whatever they can to get away from RedHat. Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE > will all benefit from this. Even in cases where non-profits and other > similar clients "contact RedHat about options because Stream won't > meet their needs"- why would such entities have ANY reason to trust > anything that RedHat says to them? > > There have been hundreds of other messages that describe exactly what > RedHat loses in this deal so I won't go into that here. But branding > oneself as a "bad faith actor" is usually a terrible way to try to > pick up a little bit of subscription revenue. In the end it's going > to be a losing scenario. This is an absolutely UNMITIGATED DISASTER > from a marketing and community goodwill standpoint. > > It can, however, be mitigated if RedHat backtracks, admits their > mistake, and affirmatively commits to support future CentOS point > releases. I'll be interested to see how this turns out. > > --JK Well said, Joshua! Very articulate! RedHat is making a mistake, unless the higher-ups at IBM are driving this, but who knows?