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

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

#91

Post by mrweasel »

ossusermivami wrote: post #51
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.…

If Redhat had announce that CentOS would no longer receive funding, but that the community would be free to take over the project, CentOS would be even more dead.

I’m sorry for the CentOS users, but I think the reality is that it’s not a project that many want to work on. It seems to require a lot of resource and it’s an operating used by people who specifically don’t want to pay.

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

#93

Post by dralley »

turminal wrote: post #84
pnutjam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to our lord and savior OpenSuse.

Which uses systemd (developed by RedHat) and has package management built on top of RPM (developed by RedHat)

To be totally fair to SUSE, they do have plenty of notable contributions into the "RPM ecosystem". Libsolv, which SUSE wrote for their Zypper package manager, is also used by DNF for example.

They also do plenty of kernel development -- not as much as RH due to sheer size, but still significant. Whereas Canonical doesn't really do any.

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

#94

Post by toyg »

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…

> making Linux distro was a highly unprofitable business.

Actually, for a period,in the dot-boom years, Linux distributions took plenty of investor money. Caldera, anyone? RedHat was "just" one of the few to figure out ways to survive the end of that wave.

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

#95

Post by ghaff »

beermonster wrote: post #83
Ottolay wrote: post #78

I don't understand the heartburn people are having about this. If you want to use a free distro, why not just move to one of the many distributions which are not tied to a for profit company?

Which other distros are there which have 10 years support? It looks like there's only Oracle Linux left currently? That is like being caught between a rock and a hard place ;-)

CentOS never had support. It only had "10 years of support" in the sense that it was a mostly compatible downstream rebuild of RHEL which does have long-term support for subscription customers.

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

#96

Post by ghaff »

beermonster wrote: post #88
jabl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is true, with the MIT license being the most popular. From Linus[1] on the topic of GPLv3, he chose GPLv2 as it was the best choice for doing kernel development - giving code and getting code back in return. One of his gripes about GPLv3, IIRC, was the 'Tivoization'[2] additions. He felt it was going too far the other way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Furthermore, unlike many other projects, Linux is not licensed GPLv2 or later and doesn't have copyright assignment. This makes changing the license unilaterally at least problematic. Not necessarily impossible but, at least some would argue the permission of all the contributors would be required which would be basically impossible.

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

#97

Post by macksd »

mrweasel wrote: post #91
ossusermivami wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If Redhat had announce that CentOS would no longer receive funding, but that the community would be free to take over the project, CentOS would be even more dead. I’m sorry for the CentOS users, but I think the reality is that it’s not a project that many want to work on. It seems to require a lot of resource and it’s an operating used by people who specifically don’t want to pay.

I suspect you're right that most users wouldn't pay, but I've gone to Red Hat's website many times over the years looking for a package that suits me and there's nothing. There's a segment of at least one (me) where they're missing out on some money for doing no additional engineering work.

I can get the workstation offering for $299. And then I can support free-as-in-libre software, I can run the same system my customers are running in production, and I get support that's probably better than Microsoft's. I don't really know what device issues I'm going to run into, though, and in my experience it either works or it doesn't - if I have a new wireless device they don't support, I'm under no illusion that my $300 next year will be the difference between them supporting it or not.

So maybe I'll get the self-supported option. But that's kinda steep - over half the cost of full support. Especially when one way to be confident about device issues is to go install the community distro (Fedora) for free and see if an old release works. If it doesn't, I'm not betting on Red Hat. If it does work... do I want to start this whole process over again, or do I just want to get to work.

Well here's another deal breaker: if I'm trying to run the same distro my customer's use in production, I'll have lots of virtual guests. No can do: my workstation license only permits 1. Let me get the server license and just install KDE myself. The self-support option only allows physical hosts. Let me get the next tier up. Now I'm up to $800 a year, and I, as a developer of software for Linux, am going to have a very unusual use case for them, I think. Should I commit $800 for 1 year of this? Does the server edition run KDE well? I doubt many people are trying that. Now I'm too nervous to cough up $800 knowing it only lasts a year anyway.

I could see myself buying a Lenovo laptop with Red Hat pre-installed and skip this, but I would want to be able to run more than 1 virtual guest with the same system - I'm not sure if Lenovo customers get special terms. Or... I can just buy a laptop I think is better from System76 and use Pop! OS. As long as there's something resembling CentOS or Scientific Linux or Rocky Linux for virtual guests, I can get close enough to my customer's production distro that this is still by far the most attractive option.

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

#98

Post by ghaff »

macksd wrote: post #97
mrweasel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Redhat had announce that CentOS would no longer receive funding, but that the community would be free to take over the project, CentOS would be even more dead. I’m sorry for the CentOS users, but I think the reality is that it’s not a project that many want to work on. It seems to require a lot of resource and it’s an operating used by people who specifically don’t want to pay.

I suspect you're right that most users wouldn't pay, but I've gone to Red Hat's website many times over the years looking for a package that suits me and there's nothing. There's a segment of at least one (me) where they're missing out on some money for doing no additional engineering work. I can get the workstation offering for $299. And then I can support free-as-in-libre software, I can run the same system my cust…

There is a free developer program (that's been recently expanded) that you should probably take a look at.
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