Hi,
I am the author of said blog article.
FIRST: It was never my intention to criticize the CentOS
team. I appreciate the hard work you are doing. If my blog
text (which is in German langugage) gave a wrong impression,
I apologize.
SECOND: I LOVE CentOS. Otherwise it would not matter to
me. I use CentOS to teach Linux administration at
university, I promote CentOS in my books and I use it
personally on some servers.
THIRD: It is a fact that the update gaps for CentOS 8 are
currently too long for productive use. Basically, that's why
I now warn against using CentOS 8 on live systems.
---
One might argue, CentOS was never intended for productive
use. Perhaps I misunderstood this. And with me all
administrators of some million web servers running on
CentOS. Hm. Time to rethink?
The way I see it, there is a need for free Linux systems. No
support, sure, but updates. In the past (and for CentOS 7,
still), I considered CentOS as 'good enough' for many
purposes. Not for the Bank of England, they can affort
whatever they like. But for a school. For a small company
needing a plain web and mail server. Etc.
The CentOS webpage says: 'CentOS Linux ... suits a wide
variety of deployments.' Currently, I really fail to see a
wide range of possible deployments.
Sure, there are other options. Out of my point of view,
Ubuntu LTS is one. Debian is. Oracle Linux (free without
support) is, too. I am not entirely in love with this
company -- but if I had the need to deploy a RHEL 8
compatible system right now, and no budget to pay for RHEL,
I would prefer it to CentOS. Sorry about this.
---
I truly believe, Red Hat has the means to make live for the
CentOS team easier. Either by simply increasing the team,
the infrastructure to build packages faster, whatever. Or by
making the clone process easier.
My guess is, they don't want. And this is OK -- who am I be
to advice a multi billion dollar company? The question is,
what does this mean for the future of CentOS? Is CentOS to
become an open development platform for Red Hat, but no
more?
These are my thoughts.
Best wishes,
Michael