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CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

theregister.com

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Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#41

Post by macksd »

>> "These are people who", the CentOS team said, "never called, never write, they don't interact with us."

So the people for whom Red Hat provided no measurable value beyond the intrinsic value of what you downloaded. The copyright for which is largely owned by Not Red Hat, and thus they're bound by the GPL.

Red Hat adds incremental value to those projects and organizes the distribution - they deserve to get paid for that, of course. But they were paid - they are the stick by which all other open source companies measure their commercial success. If you advertise being open source as a good thing, the ability to fork is a feature, not a bug. So the Rocky Linuxes of the world are inevitable and a good thing.

Acquiring the CentOS project and then killing it is destroying a lot of community good will and I have no sympathy...

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#42

Post by cheph »

The title is a bit misleading IMO.

> What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS.

CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#44

Post by IgorPartola »

adamcstephens wrote: post #20
Frost1x wrote: post #8

Large corporation undermines a group of people to make a buck, news at 11... Businesses aren't your friends , repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your go…

Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. Be wary of either group selling them as such.

This isn’t untrue but it’s also an absolutist statement. There is a big difference between Canonical and Oracle, between Zappos (before Amazon bought them) and Walmart, between Starbucks and McDonalds. Your experience working for these will be vastly different. Your experience dealing with them will be also different. And some will behave closer to “good citizens” than others.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#45

Post by pjmlp »

s5ma6n wrote: post #14
cpach wrote: post #5

An alternative distro is being developed here: https://rockylinux.org/

This is good news but due to the nature of widely adopted open-source projects, they are still vulnerable to a similar situation. It is listed that AWS is one of the sponsors of the Rocky Linux. Recently we have seen what happened between elastic and AWS. So, AWS could also pull an IBM and decide to drop it or tie it tightly with AWS services etc. It is a difficult situation in general and it is a shame that this was…

They already have it,https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#46

Post by pjmlp »

turminal wrote: post #34
1996 wrote: post #4

Personally, I'm very happy the new RedHat showed their true colors so fast: it helped me decide to leave their ecosystem. EDIT: added "the new" to qualify the statement about RedHat, as indeed it's IBM at play. No amount of "kernel support" is worth the trouble of dealing with them.

Choices are though if you want to leave the RedHat ecosystem. Sure you can leave CentOS for Debian or Fedora for Ubuntu, but the entire Linux ecosystem is gradually becoming RedHat ecosystem.

Which kind of proves the point how hard it is to make any money out of FOSS when software is the product.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#47

Post by randmeerkat »

IgorPartola wrote: post #44
adamcstephens wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. Be wary of either group selling them as such.

This isn’t untrue but it’s also an absolutist statement. There is a big difference between Canonical and Oracle, between Zappos (before Amazon bought them) and Walmart, between Starbucks and McDonalds. Your experience working for these will be vastly different. Your experience dealing with them will be also different. And some will behave closer to “good citizens” than others.

A company isn’t a “citizen”, it isn’t even a “person”.

Also why do we even give credence to ideas such as good corporate “citizenship”? Thank you for not destroying the economy or societal fabric..? Way to be a good for profit entity that probably still isn’t raising wages or helping with the homeless crisis..? There should be strong laws and regulations that bind companies and jail their execs if they step out of line. We shouldn’t depend so heavily on so called good corporate “citizenship”.

I didn’t vote for these executives, their boards, or their investors. This isn’t what democracy looks like.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#48

Post by mrkstu »

adamcstephens wrote: post #20
Frost1x wrote: post #8

Large corporation undermines a group of people to make a buck, news at 11... Businesses aren't your friends , repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your go…

Businesses aren’t your friends. Employers aren’t your family. Be wary of either group selling them as such.

You may have friends at work but yes, don't confuse that with the employer organization itself being your friend. The business will 99.999% do what's better for itself (as defined by the executive team, which is incentivized by the policies of the board) rather that what is best for any employee and sometimes for all employees, though there has to be some agreement with what is best for 'all employees' in order to attract any decent ones.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#49

Post by Frost1x »

api wrote: post #31
Frost1x wrote: post #8

Large corporation undermines a group of people to make a buck, news at 11... Businesses aren't your friends , repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your go…

Refusing to invest isn't undermining. It's just refusing to invest. Undermining would be if RedHat did things to actively sabotage CentOS, spread untrue FUD about it, file lawsuits, etc.

Undermining is a proactive action to weaken something. Refusing to invest may or may not be undermining depending on prior state and intent (a lack of action with no history can still be proactive, it simply lacks prior state information to assess). Withdraw of investment with clear negative implications is undermining, which is what happened here.

You can weaken through direct attack, withdraw of assistance, or you can even strategically offer assistance to weaken (identify largely unknown harmful processes and help them grow), amongst an array of other strategies, direct and indirect.

The grey area is if you've been a bystander to action and refuse to act one way or another because intent is the only information you have and you can't (fairly) gauge on that alone. This isn't one of those cases, this is a clear case of withdraw of active assistence which undermined CentOS. Business processes often work in reverse of what is explained. It's not likely Red Hat made a decision and then informed CentOS there would be consequences. It's far far more likely Red Hat looked for decisions that had the consequence they desired, chose one, and then informed CentOS that wasn't their intent.

These sorts of games of misdirection of intent and responsibility are played by businesses and sociopaths all the time. Decisions like this are highly strategic and implications are discussed throughly, meanwhile the narrative is crafted to then look benign and non-strategic.

Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it

#50

Post by luma »

m4r71n wrote: post #37
Daho0n wrote: post #2

So, we finally see IBM showing its ugly face. No more CentOS.

Why are people assuming this is in any way IBM's doing? I know it's easy to say "IBM bad" but everything that has been said so far indicates this was a joint decision between Red Hat engineering and the CentOS project board members. The cognitive dissonance in assuming every acquisition of a smaller company by a bigger one immediately results in the collapse of said small company is unreal.

It's not small versus big, Red Hat was a $34B acquisition. It's big and bigger. People are pointing at IBM because this is 100% the predictable consequence of a company like IBM purchasing an open source software organization. Open source isn't in their business model, so of course this was going to happen.
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