Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

lists.centos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 642 posts

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#251

Post by IntelMiner »

chasil wrote: post #246
bayindirh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a silent but relatively big user base of CentOS in HPC and scientific computing. ScientificLinux and CentOS rules all HPC clusters. Clusters are like enterprise servers. Big, monolithic, rarely upgraded. They're upgraded in one big-fell swoop and left to run. There'll be another clone of RHEL since HPC can't accept CentOS Stream as the alternative. The whole infra is too big to move to Debian too. So with tod…

Oracle already has a clone that performs an in-place conversion of an installed CentOS 7 system. There is a page describing the conversion: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ They have a shell script to convert a CentOS install to Oracle Linux, so you can buy support if you want. The converter only works with versions 5, 6, and 7. It does not work with CentOS 8. It would be nice if that could get updated.

I don't think many people who want to use something stable like CentOS, but don't want to pay for a RHEL support contract would want to pay Oracle for RHEL-but-with-Oracle-sprinkles-on-top

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#253

Post by centimeter »

DCKing wrote: post #199

What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? If they're just transparently killing of the "free version of RHEL", that surely won't work in anything but name? There's an obvious need for a 1:1 RHEL clone, and due to the license of all software that RHEL builds on, there's no way IBM or Red Hat can stop people from actually building their own "new CentOS" and many companies and communities have done so in th…

> What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

They're probably banking on it taking a few years for a standard centos replacement to be established.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#254

Post by InvaderFizz »

apecat wrote: post #191
apecat wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, GoDaddy, or heh, AWS are The Man. My best hope is that the major hosting vendors, or maybe some industry consortium might offer resources for this.

@syshum, yes, but it's not exacly RHEL, and it's not distributed outside AWS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347232 But the point is indeed that there are resources and infrastructure, so one might be hopeful that there will be a good outcome. One possible outcome would be increased demand and resources for Debian and/or Ubuntu and I definitely wouldn't mind that (five years of support isn't all that much in I…

> @syshum, yes, but it's not exacly RHEL, and it's not distributed outside AWS

On the first point you are correct. It's not exactly RHEL7.

On the second point, Amazon provides images for running on prem[0]. We run a lot of dev AmazonLinux2 VMs on prem so that the local computing environment matches the deployed EC2 environment.

0: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l...

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#255

Post by enz »

LinuxBender wrote: post #53
curt15 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But Facebook uses it" Since Facebook actually uses kernels from Fedora Rawhide (necessary for btrfs support I guess), their systems are nowhere near the CentOS you and I would use.

Facebook have their own kernel developers. It was a selling point one of their teams used to try to lure me there.

It must be a classic selling point... a French company (pretty big) told me the same thing to lure me (even if my hypothetical job was not directly related to that fact)

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#256

Post by kbenson »

DCKing wrote: post #199

What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? If they're just transparently killing of the "free version of RHEL", that surely won't work in anything but name? There's an obvious need for a 1:1 RHEL clone, and due to the license of all software that RHEL builds on, there's no way IBM or Red Hat can stop people from actually building their own "new CentOS" and many companies and communities have done so in th…

> All we have now is Red Hat taking the CentOS branding and running with it. And even that point I don't get - they could have done this with plain RHEL or Fedora branding too.

Yeah, it's all very confusing. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that CentOS has so much mind-share that RHEL wants to tap into that and funnel it back to themselves more effectively. It used to be people knew what Red Hat was and you had to tell them about CentOS, now so many people use and know CentOS I think there's probably a good chance a lot of them don't even know that it's a respin of RHEL.

All of this only makes sense to me if the whole point is to leverage the popularity of CentOS into more RHEL subscriptions by providing a product that's more annoying for most people that care about a stable server (because it's backing their business) to use because it's less static.

Personally, I think it doesn't matter why Red Hat bought CentOS, what matters is what they just did, and as I think that's purely self serving (and to the detriment of the public and community) and if there are apologist engineers here that work for RH, perhaps they should look closely at how management is managing them, because of course management is going to present it in a way that tries not to alienate their staff and community. The results speak for themselves though, CentOS in the form that so many people relied on is effectively dead in a year.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#257

Post by centimeter »

em500 wrote: post #30
messe wrote: post #11

> CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021 Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? Weren't maintenance updates meant to go to 2029? What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then?

> Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? They've just eradicated almost all mentions of CentOS 8 from their main website. So: yes. > What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then? They just got what they paid for?

> They just got what they paid for?

Funny, but isn't this totally reasonable grounds for an adverse possession claim against RHEL?

If a business claims they're going to keep doing something, and you build your business on that claim, and then they change their mind, you can have grounds to sue. Or, at least, that's what I vaguely remember from reading about AP law.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#258

Post by kbenson »

centimeter wrote: post #253
DCKing wrote: post #199

What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? If they're just transparently killing of the "free version of RHEL", that surely won't work in anything but name? There's an obvious need for a 1:1 RHEL clone, and due to the license of all software that RHEL builds on, there's no way IBM or Red Hat can stop people from actually building their own "new CentOS" and many companies and communities have done so in th…

> What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're probably banking on it taking a few years for a standard centos replacement to be established.

What I'm wondering is how open the CentOS build tooling is at this point, and to a lesser degree how open it was in the past and when it changed if it did.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#259

Post by pnutjam »

bayindirh wrote: post #235
apecat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if the web hosting industry will rebel and build another RHEL clone project that just gets the 10-year supported patches. Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? A really big chunk of the world's traditionally shared hosted websites run on CentOS, because most commercial control panel packages and hosting automation systems are built for that. A rebadged CentOS is also AWS's default distro. Wonder of…

There's a silent but relatively big user base of CentOS in HPC and scientific computing. ScientificLinux and CentOS rules all HPC clusters. Clusters are like enterprise servers. Big, monolithic, rarely upgraded. They're upgraded in one big-fell swoop and left to run. There'll be another clone of RHEL since HPC can't accept CentOS Stream as the alternative. The whole infra is too big to move to Debian too. So with tod…

We used SLES like that on our HPC. SLES and RH will run just fine without subscriptions if you don't plan to update them.

The license for RH precludes you from running unlicensed RH, if you have any licensed RH. I don't believe SuSE does the same.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#260

Post by jcrites »

apecat wrote: post #140
awill wrote: post #109

This is awful. It's proof of the downsides to the IBM acquisition, which I think we all knew was coming. Imagine if you were running a business, and deployed CentOS 8 based on the 10 year lifespan promise. You're totally screwed now, and Red Hat knows it. Why on earth didn't they make this switch starting with CentOS 9???? Let's not sugar coat this. They've betrayed their users. I personally run a CentOS 7 server (as…

Wonder if the web hosting industry will rebel and build another RHEL clone project that just gets the 10-year supported patches. Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? A really big chunk of the world's traditionally shared hosted websites run on CentOS, because most commercial control panel packages and hosting automation systems are built for that. A rebadged CentOS is also AWS's default distro. Wonder of…

Amazon Linux 2 could be a viable alternative. In addition to being available to run on AWS, it's also available as a container image and in various machine image formats:

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/#Resources

AL has had enough work put into it over the years that, while it may have been inspired by CentOS/RHEL originally, calling it a rebadged CentOS is not accurate these days. A full and competent team maintains it. While it's clearly made similar architectural choices, those are also for compatibility reasons.

However I doubt that support is available for anyone not running it on AWS, at least not from AWS -- but then again folks running CentOS weren't paying for support from RHEL either.

I also wonder if the announcement is as bad as people make it sound. I'm not an expert in Linux distros, but my understanding is that AL2 also uses a streams-like model, in that it provides long term support (patches for existing software) while also making new software available. My understanding was that, while it is inevitably versioned by making artifacts like VMs and containers available over CDNs ( https://cdn.amazonlinux.com/os-images/2.0.20201111.0/ ), the expectation is that most users will always launch the latest version, relying on its backward compatibility. Perhaps someone who knows more about the specifics of its release model could comment.

Post reply on HN