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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

#51

Post by ossusermivami »

macksd wrote: post #41

>> "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…

I agree with you _but_ i don't think CentOS would have survived if not for the redhat acquisition maybe they could have in some alternate way (perhaps rockylinux can achieve this?) but the cost of producing CentOS in that form was way too high if not for the contribution of Redhat,

Unpopular opionion but i think Redhat probably just extended the lifespan of the centos distribution instead of killing it straight away.

(I am saying that as someone who has donated to the rockylinux project)

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

#52

Post by mrkstu »

randmeerkat wrote: post #47
IgorPartola wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Corporate citizenship lasts as long as you have a CEO that values it and the CEO has a highly profitable company that they can afford to be generous w/o pissing off the board.

Look at someplace like Costco- highly profitable, pays well above average for the sector, employee and community friendly policies... which would all go in the trash if Sams Club starting eating their lunch and their margins disappeared.

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

#53

Post by mjw1007 »

So, according to this article the Red Hat "liaison with the CentOS project" said:

« we went to the CentOS project and said, here is a thing Red Hat is going to do. We believe there are consequences of this action... the end result was the decision that got made by the project »

Something doesn't seem right, if CentOS is really a project capable of making its own decisions as he's trying to make it appear.

If that was the case, I wouldn't expect that the first thing the public to hear about the change would be the announcement that CentOS-in-its-previous-form was being discontinued.

I would expect to hear the board saying « Red Hat say they're no longer going to invest in CentOS in its current form. If nobody comes forward to invest with money or staff, we'll have to discontinue it. »

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

#55

Post by ghaff »

luma wrote: post #50
m4r71n wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Open source isn't in their business model

There's a very good possibility that Linux wouldn't have had the impact that it has had absent IBM's investments in the early 2000s. It's not an "open source company" but it has significant investments in open source.

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

#56

Post by piokoch »

macksd wrote: post #41

>> "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…

There are many companies that are growing on free software without contributing to it much, however I would hesitate to add Red Hat to that category.

First of all they were one of the first Linux distro (I remember installing 4.2 at home) with Debian and Slackware. At those times making Linux distro was a highly unprofitable business. Companies did not care about Linux at all. Windows, Sparx, AIX, IBM mainframes, etc. everywhere.

Yet Red Hat people had a vision that Linux could be a thing in the real World and I would say, they deserve a premium for all those hungry years.

Second, Red Hat is one of the largest corporate contributors to Linux kernel. I bet that, for instance, Amazon AWS is making way more money on Linux and open software than Red Hat, yet their contribution is not particularly significant.

I am not surprised that Red Hat is not supporting financially something that is a rip-off of their software. A legal rip-off obviously and Red Hat is not suing or spreading FUD about such initiatives, but I don't see any reason why they should financially back them.

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

#57

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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…

Additional reminders:

- corporate-driven open source was never about user/developer freedom

- companies have marketing departments and know how to do astroturfing

- any project that follows corporate decisions is not community-driven, even if the contributors are volunteers

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

#58

Post by daxelrod »

daptaq wrote: post #15

If this can happen to CentOS, do we have to fear a comparable fate for Fedora? I've been using it for the last year, and it has been a nice change, but I wouldn't want it to die out because of strategy decisions. On the other hand, Fedora and RHEL don't seem to be in direct competition.

Fedora is strategically useful to Red Hat as an upstream of CentOS Stream, which is now an upstream of RHEL. As long as that remains the case, I wouldn’t expect them to pull funding.

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

#59

Post by macksd »

piokoch wrote: post #56
macksd wrote: post #41

>> "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…

There are many companies that are growing on free software without contributing to it much, however I would hesitate to add Red Hat to that category. First of all they were one of the first Linux distro (I remember installing 4.2 at home) with Debian and Slackware. At those times making Linux distro was a highly unprofitable business. Companies did not care about Linux at all. Windows, Sparx, AIX, IBM mainframes, etc…

Under no circumstances did anyone force Red Hat to financially back CentOS, nor did I say they didn't deserve a premium. In fact I said the opposite.

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

#60

Post by wtetzner »

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.

> Employers aren’t your family.

Unless you work for the family business ;)

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