“A lot of people would say support is 'can I just call someone', but support is also all of those updates and security fixes," he said.”
Here’s the crux of it.
CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
101–110 of 139 posts
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 !
Sure, but IBM is going to want something for their $34B. Presumably they had a plan for getting that return prior to the purchase. Obviously it's not going according to plan now - they had a plan for CentOS and instead it has been destroyed. If I were IBM, I'd be taking a step back to understand things better before screwing things up more, because there is obviously a disconnect.
I think the IBM Redhat purchase could have been a very good thing if handled properly. CentOS was actually a feature of RHEL in a way, but no more.
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#103Earlier 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…
While annoying in terms of managing licenses, doesn’t the new 16 system developer licens solve your problem with virtual machines?
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#104>> "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 agree with you _but_ i don't think CentOS would have survived if not for the redhat acquisition
Based on what? I just went digging through the archives (granted I only spent ~10 minutes) because that's not at all how I remember it, and nothing indicates the CentOS team were facing insurmountable financial hardship or asking the community for more support. Either as part of the acquisition announcement or in the months prior to it.
https://lwn.net/Articles/579551/
https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/01/10/red-hats-centos-acq...
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#105This comment concerns me:
"The next version will not be like Stream 8. "We have said publicly this is not the way it's going to be. Stream 9 is going to show you that code flows from Fedora to CentOS Stream"
To me, this indicates Stream will be rather close to Fedora. Right now Stream seems rather stable. But that tells me Stream will be a rolling release of Fedora. Do others read it that way ?
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
10 years of security updates/critical fixes.
Which means you can set it up once, install your mail server or whatever, and have a solid and secure system for a very long time.
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
upstart predates systemd by 4 years.
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#108In the company where I work, we pay for Windows equipped machines (The Windows license is included in the sale price), but pay nothing for CentOS equipped machines. I can understand, why Red Hat wanted to stop that.
Will CentOS stream not be feasible for them? They can always look at No-cost RHEL for small production workloads and No-cost RHEL for customer development teams (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...)
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, Linus himself mentioned they'd all need to be contacted and agree. He also said he saw the GPLv3 draft and so it was an early and conscious decision to not have a 'GPLv2 or later' license.
Re: CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat refused to invest in it
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
While annoying in terms of managing licenses, doesn’t the new 16 system developer licens solve your problem with virtual machines?
That would have addressed all my big concerns, yes. In fact, especially if it had a 7-day trial period or something there's no reason I wouldn't be down to pay for that - I'm making a living in their ecosystem after all.
But personally for me the moment's past and that offering is still not actually available AFAICT. I no longer work with customers in their ecosystem much and the CentOS dealings feel too close to embrace-extend-extinguish for me to feel like championing them again.