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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

#61

Post by raesene9 »

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…

I'd say that the original investors in Red Hat have had their premium for all the hungry years, selling the business to IBM for $34 billion !

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

#62

Post by bartread »

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.

> There is a big difference between Canonical and Oracle, between Zappos (before Amazon bought them) and Walmart

Right up to the moment where there isn't.

Some companies have great values, a great culture, an inspiring mission and they'll be relatively consistent in maintaining these things for quite extended periods of time: years, sometimes even decades. That's really easy to do during the good times: when you're hitting your numbers and all the trendlines are pointing upwards.

However, when things get more difficult - when there's a downturn, competitors move in, or the market simply moves on - that equation changes a lot. Sooner or later under those circumstances every business has to start making hard calls that will make it very clear to all involved that it is not a family.

We can all point to examples of businesses that have gone out of their way to look after their employees during the pandemic. But even they can't do so indefinitely (hopefully they won't have to try if the vaccination programmes work as well as we all hope). Sooner or later the values of a business will become subservient to commercial reality even if that doesn't happen to our values as individuals.

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

#63

Post by akudha »

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.

That is like saying robbery is better than murder. Yes, it is true that Canonical is better than Oracle, but they are all businesses in the end. I've had a dozen jobs so far, some were better than others, even fun. But the one common thread in all of those jobs is - none of them gave a shit about me, however hard/smart I worked for them. I've experienced the same as a paying customer.

Customers, employees, partners etc are all means to one end, and one only - making someone rich

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

#64

Post by raesene9 »

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.

Whilst I'm not sure that there is strong evidence for this being related to the IBM acquisition, the idea of "blue wash" where acquired products have their licensing changed to fit in with IBM's way of doing things is so common that there's even an IBM web page about it https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/what-blue-wash.

To quote that page "Once customers upgrade to IBM?s product it is often too late to negotiate and avoid hefty licensing charges associated with changed licensing metrics? "

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

#65

Post by turminal »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
turminal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean, if there were other successful companies other than RedHat, the ecosystem would be more diverse?

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

#66

Post by neilwilson »

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…

"I should point out that there are classes of businesses that do exist somewhat as an exception, certain charities and non-profits"

Not even sure about those. Quite a lot of charities and non-profits set up to fix a problem end up perpetuating it because it is a nice comfortable job.

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

#67

Post by INTPenis »

cheph wrote: post #42

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.

Yes I was looking for someone to see it from my view. At least I assume we are on the same page here.

What I see here is Redhat optimizing the release cycle. Please correct me if I'm wrong or my english is bad but it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream than the overhead that was each CentOS release.

And in that process they gain a sort of dev branch of RedHat that people can use to get a distro as close as possible to what RedHat will be, but also beta testers.

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

#68

Post by ghaff »

cheph wrote: post #42

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.

This is almost certainly underappreciated. A lot of software has moved away from long term support of point releases. Good luck getting one of the big cloud providers to commit to an unchanging point release of their platforms with backported security and major bug fixes. CentOS Stream is essentially RHEL nightlies that have gone through gating CI tests.

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

#69

Post by Cthulhu_ »

neilwilson wrote: post #66
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…

"I should point out that there are classes of businesses that do exist somewhat as an exception, certain charities and non-profits" Not even sure about those. Quite a lot of charities and non-profits set up to fix a problem end up perpetuating it because it is a nice comfortable job.

I'm pretty confident there's a lot of charities / nonprofits set up as a money laundering and tax dodging scheme.

I mean one of the richest families in NL have their money in a bank that is part of a charity.

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

#70

Post by dralley »

turminal wrote: post #39
api wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They slowly got the majority in the CentOS steering committee thus gaining all the power they needed to kill it. And then they did. There was no "you can still be CentOS but without our funding".

It didn't happen slowly, it happened quickly. In 2014, when they effectively rescued the CentOS project by investing at a time when it had been slowly dying for a couple of years.
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