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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

lists.centos.org

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Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#341

Post by AdrianB1 »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #247
orev wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to eat and pay rent. New developers are doing everything on web/cloud and see no reason to invest time in open source on “legacy” on-prem systems, despite the fact that those are what underlie all of those higher level tiers. Since new developers are not stepping in, the older guys who started the projects just want to get away from the relentlessly thankless activity of giving stuff away for free, or may…

my question stands. if you are a corporation, why are you offering an open source in the first place? i am not talking about a library developer who built it for fun but because its MIT, every faang is using it extensively and the original dev is not getting any remuneration while faang is earning big bucks. that is not the issue here. specifically if travis had the idea to pull a bait and switch always to the commun…

As a corporation you open source at least pieces needed for interoperability, that is a valid reason. Otherwise you can get into the pains of SMB/Samba or drivers for paid databases for more programming languages one is able to support. For example Microsoft is working on the PHP driver for SQL server, this helps them by opening the door to PHP developers to use MS SQL and eventually pay for Standard or Enterprise editions instead of using the free Express one. It is kind of a freemium game.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#342

Post by toast0 »

apecat wrote: post #297
space_ghost wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD is starting to look really good.

I would agree that BSD systems are nicer to look at, and FreeBSD supporting major releases for five years, with forcing people to install point releases once a year is really quite nice. But I don't see BSD becoming practical as a platform to run (commercial enterprise) Linux software, when it's already a pain to get packages and support for anything that's not RHEL/CentOS.

It's not ideal, but you can run Linux software on FreeBSD. Commercial enterprise tends to be conservative and not need bleeding edge Linux interfaces that may not be available through the linux emulation layer yet.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#343

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

breakingcups wrote: post #311
jsiepkes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat will probably get a one time boost in RHEL sales at the expense that the void created by the CentOS project will be filled by some CentOS-fork they have no control over. Maybe they have some grand scheme I'm not seeing but it feels short sighted.

Until IBM / Red Hat acquires that fork just like they did CentOS

A community-controlled organization could just opt to not be acquired (and indeed should, given this precedent).

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#344

Post by StillBored »

lutorm wrote: post #250
teilo wrote: post #20

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I read this, CentOS Stream will still serve as a stable clone of RHEL just as it always has. The rolling distro will be tagged at a certain point in time for a RHEL release, and you can still choose to use that state as your production base, and be locked at that tag. Presumably there will be a CentOS Stream 9 tag that you can use for production. The difference will be that CentOS…

It seems that if you do that, you will not get any updates, including security updates?

Yah, it sounds that way.

Rolling forward to the head is required to get the most recent security updates. Which isn't that far away from how centos works today. With rhel you get security updates for the point releases (8.1,8.2,etc) for a while after the new point release comes out. With centos, the day that the newer version drops, they don't tend to roll security updates into the older ones.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#345

Post by eropple »

m4rtink wrote: post #318
cesarb wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option) In my experience (just went through that, F32 -> F33), it's painless but definitely not "an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee"; each machine took a whole day, it's a huge download (many gigabytes) and the install itself seems to be sever…

Fedora Silverblue can be an option then - the roots is an immutable snapshots tracked by OSTree It can build an updated OSTree snapshot in the background & only the difference from what you have are downloaded. Then you reboot into that new snapshot, while still having the old one (and ony other you care to keep) available, in case something is not right with the new one. That should address most of the issues you me…

Silverblue, in my experience, is not really there. I like the idea. As of my latest try at it in August, I wouldn't recommend anybody recommend it unless they're going to be physically standing in front of the machine on a regular basis.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#346

Post by fweespeech »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #266
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…

>> 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. The hypothetical you posed is the actual situation, I am now learning, I have apparently forced on my team. We've ramped up labor 3x revenue preparing product launch in 90 - 180 days. We created an image containing centos 8 , Java , postgres and tomcat a year ago an…

> edit: after a little thought it seems that moving to RHEL might cost us the least amount of money and downtime. Still sucks and not what we need to be working on right now.

And that is exactly what IBM is counting on. Vendor lock in.

We are switching to Debian-based distros because, frankly, we don't trust IBM not to knife us in the back even on RHEL for more money. Of course we have the advantage of being able to take the time to convert.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#347

Post by phone8675309 »

chasil wrote: post #165
phone8675309 wrote: post #160

How does this affect FermiLAB? They stopped development on Scientific Linux to rebase on CentOS and now CentOS might not be useful for their purposes.

Hello, Oracle Linux. http://linux.oracle.com

They specifically made Scientific Linux as a royalty free alternative to RHEL so I can’t imagine they’d jump to a royalty-encumbered value loss Oracle Linux distro.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#348

Post by bonzini »

fweespeech wrote: post #346
Jimmc414 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. The hypothetical you posed is the actual situation, I am now learning, I have apparently forced on my team. We've ramped up labor 3x revenue preparing product launch in 90 - 180 days. We created an image containing centos 8 , Java , postgres and tomcat a year ago an…

> edit: after a little thought it seems that moving to RHEL might cost us the least amount of money and downtime. Still sucks and not what we need to be working on right now. And that is exactly what IBM is counting on. Vendor lock in. We are switching to Debian-based distros because, frankly, we don't trust IBM not to knife us in the back even on RHEL for more money. Of course we have the advantage of being able to…

This is not about IBM. It may not be a pleasant change for everyone, but it's a change that has strictly technical motives.

CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat's upstream for layered products (at the time mostly RDO/OpenStack and oVirt/RHEV) could not use Fedora because it was too far from RHEL a year of two after RHEL was released, could not use RHEL because upstream contributors would have to pay, and could not use CentOS because its releases had too large delays. The solution was to make CentOS releases happen timely by paying people to make them.

These days a RHEL downstream is not enough for the layered products. Some of them require the kind of bleeding edge feature that is backported every six months to the RHEL kernel, and corresponding userspace changes (BPF, virtualization, etc.) and cannot afford waiting for the CentOS release because development must be done in parallel with RHEL. So the solution was to move CentOS from happening after RHEL to before RHEL which is what CentOS Stream is.

I can confidently say that the reasons are technical because other CentOS downstream have the same needs (e.g. Facebook's) and they also want to send patches to CentOS for bugfixes or features themselves, instead of waiting for Red Hat to find out about that bug, or decide they need the same feature. Plus there's no reason for rebuilds to disappear. The SRPMs will still be released by Red Hat.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#349

Post by bonzini »

wang_li wrote: post #337
vbezhenar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? I think that's a gray area. For example RHEL has some support branches where they'll produce security updates for minor updates. For example you can pay a lot of money and you'll get RHEL 7.2 with security updates. They won't release sources for those packages unless you'll ask for those packages (you, as a paid client, not you as nobody in the Internet). But if you'…

> They won't release sources for those packages unless you'll ask for those packages (you, as a paid client, not you as nobody in the Internet). If the code in question is licensed under the GPL and Red Hat isn't the owner of the code, then I as a rando on the Internet can ask them for the source and if they don't provide it, the person who does own the code can sue them and revoke their license to distribute said co…

You can only ask them for the source if you already have the binaries and you've gotten them from Red Hat. If you got the binaries from someone else, you can ask that someone else.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#350

Post by bonzini »

toxic wrote: post #291
mattdm wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? Whether or not Red Hat "has to", Red Hat is an all open source company and does and will.

Redhat is a fully-owned subsidiary of IBM. IBM is open source friendly, but the days of RH being an "all open source company" ended in July 2019.

Red Hat is still all open source, its owner isn't.
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