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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

#71

Post by lumost »

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.

The mistake people often make is mistaking a "fun" or "caring" atmosphere and demeanor of the company and assuming that that actually means the company cares about "fun" or cares for their employees.

If there is anything that poses a risk to the company, interferes with an employees ability to serve the company, or in any way reduces productivity... there will be no difference between canonical and oracle or even canonical and McDonalds.

The difference between your experience working at these companies is largely window dressing on the same corporate employer/employee model.

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

#72

Post by dralley »

turminal wrote: post #65
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

SUSE is successful too, just small.

Canonical has a wide audience but they've been unable to actually translate that into a self-sustaining business. They're lucky that Mark Shuttleworth is committed guy and not too attached to his stacks of money.

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

#73

Post by dralley »

z29LiTp5qUC30n wrote: post #23
naringas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only trying to say what they really are. it would be unfair to judge them only based on what they are. then again, I see open source slowly but steadily losing ground. and if open source has a tough time. free software has it even worse.

The Free Software community is having a Renaissance right now and making advances on nearly every front. Turns out not compromising your principals and being zealots works.

Free software is doing well, yes. Businesses built-around free software, not so much. The list of successful companies based on fully FOSS software can practically be counted on one hand. Most of the time, the product may be very successful, but the company is really struggling.

A lot of OSS development is now done by companies who don't care that much about the software, because their revenue is totally independent. Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, etc.

Or it's open-core like Redis and Gitlab, with paid proprietary bits. Or "open source" with anti-service-provider licenses like MongoDB, Elastic, Redis.

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

#74

Post by 1996 »

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.

> the entire Linux ecosystem is gradually becoming RedHat ecosystem.

No. Suse still exists, if you don't like Debian based distribution. But my money is on the Debians - and more specifically, on Ubuntu.

For server stuff, Ubuntu is great - commercial support with various cloud providers, lots of prepackaged software (including the commercial software I use).

For hiring, a lot of students run either Debian or Ubuntu on their own computers - meaning I don't have to teach them the intricacies of rpm like apt search is rpm -Q, apt install is rpm -i ...

Icing on the cake is ZFS as the rootfs filesystem out of the box since the last few Ubuntus.

RedHat was innovative, like when they replaced ext4 by XFS as the default filesystem, but that was like 15 years ago.

Still, big money make miracles happen. If IBM can arrange some relicensing of ZFS with Oracle, they could use it on RedHat, but it'd take me a lot of cajoling to even consider switching back - much more than a filesystem that's the minimal prerequisite to just put RedHat on the list of options. Bitten once, twice shy you know?

Anyway, given how it's favored for WSL, Microsoft will eventually fork or buy Ubuntu from Canonical or just buy Canonical outright, which will make it even more of a rival to RedHat in the long term.

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

#75

Post by 1996 »

dralley wrote: post #72
turminal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SUSE is successful too, just small. Canonical has a wide audience but they've been unable to actually translate that into a self-sustaining business. They're lucky that Mark Shuttleworth is committed guy and not too attached to his stacks of money.

I see Ubuntu future in the hands of Microsoft!

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

#76

Post by luma »

ghaff wrote: post #55
luma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IBM of 2020 isn't the IBM of 2000. I'll look at their actions, not their words.

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

#77

Post by jabl »

z29LiTp5qUC30n wrote: post #23
naringas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only trying to say what they really are. it would be unfair to judge them only based on what they are. then again, I see open source slowly but steadily losing ground. and if open source has a tough time. free software has it even worse.

The Free Software community is having a Renaissance right now and making advances on nearly every front. Turns out not compromising your principals and being zealots works.

Wait, what have I missed?

I thought copyleft licensing has been steadily losing share to permissive licensing for a long time, with no end in sight. Can you point to information indicating otherwise?

The Linux kernel itself keeps going from success to success, but that seems to be the last major copyleft bastion, and they also somewhat famously rejected GPLv3.

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

#79

Post by pnutjam »

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.

Let me introduce you to our lord and savior OpenSuse.

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

#80

Post by turminal »

dralley wrote: post #72
turminal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SUSE is successful too, just small. Canonical has a wide audience but they've been unable to actually translate that into a self-sustaining business. They're lucky that Mark Shuttleworth is committed guy and not too attached to his stacks of money.

I just asked GP to clarify what he meant.

My original comment was exactly about the ways canonical, SUSE, Debian and others are dependent on RedHat. Canonical attempted to develop upstart as their in house systemd alternative but they failed. Exactly the same thing happened with their attempt at their own graphics stack.

I don't know a lot about SUSE, but iirc their distro is also systemd based.

Edit: Suse's package manager is also based on RPM.

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