[CentOS] Blog article about the state of CentOS

Wed Jun 17 19:02:12 UTC 2020
Phil Perry <pperry at elrepo.org>

On 17/06/2020 18:38, Michael Kofler wrote:
> 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?
> 

As far as I'm aware that has always been the case. Johnny has never been 
slow in coming forward and saying if you need updates, or a service 
level agreement, or support then you should buy RHEL. That is what it is 
for. If not, then use CentOS for free. But don't use CentOS for free on 
production servers and then shout or act surprised when you don't have 
updates on a timescale you consider appropriate.

Nothing has changed in this regard for as long as I've been a CentOS 
user or been involved in the CentOS community. If you are now having to 
rethink your approach then you probably either haven't given it 
sufficient thought in the first place or you originally came to the 
wrong conclusion.

This is a non-issue. Nothing has changed. Things were exactly the same 
with CentOS 4, CentOS 5, CentOS 6, CentOS 7, and by it's very nature it 
will be the same in CentOS 9... The simple matter is it takes time to 
rebuild a complete OS and there will always be a lag. Either that is 
acceptable to you and you use it, or you purchase a RHEL license for 
your publicly facing infrastructure. The only issue here is people's 
unrealistic expectations, and to be fair the CentOS Project can hardly 
be accused of falsely raising peoples expectations having consistently 
stated it will be ready when it's done for at least the last 15 years.