161–170 of 178 posts
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> doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff Why are you not considering PR/legal/community stuff as being worthy?
It would frighten me having Kurtzer doing legalities, given his bizarre legal theory on copyright specifically (no longer recorded in the issues of a deleted github repo for me to reference).
Thanks.
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It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority o…
> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…
He got it because after he suggested the name (CentOS) and I approved it and it was then accepted by the others, he promised to hand over the domain name which he was squatting on to the Caos Foundation (a 501(c)3).
Jump forward, Lance and the Centos web team had Red Hat trademark violations on the centos.org website and they alienated Red Hat's legal team enough for them to come after me personally. I believed in Red Hat and we needed to correct our actions, so I reached out to Lance and the web team to rectify the situation. My requests were ignored as they didn't care that they were doing a disservice to Red Hat. I forced the situation as much as I could, which was purely political as the Caos Foundation didn't have access or control over the domain. After the PNALV fiasco, matters got worse, and Lance was able to control the project because he retained controlled the domain.
This was how Lance inherited the ownership of the project, well over a year after Rocky passed away. It was a matter of board manipulation (he convinced the Caos Foundation board that it was okay for him to own the domain). Note, he continued being a bad actor even afterwords when he went AWOL and was pocketing donations personally when the developers had to write him a public open letter to hand over the domain.
What I said is not my subjective view of history, it is corroborated fact which was never challenged or questioned until I founded Rocky Linux.
The right question to ask now... Why are some people spreading rumors trying to rewrite history and slander me (and thus Rocky).
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> I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers Could you elaborate?
The Alma Linux guys seemed happy to engage with the community, for example by coming on the Linux Unplugged podcast and discussing the (at the time) future governance structure of Alma. Rocky Linux rather agressively declined to come onto that same podcast iirc.
There were multiple times that the media and podcasters would try to pin the two projects against each other, perhaps for ratings..?
Not to take the drama and flare out of the story, but we just didn't want to engage in that.
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> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…
Lance did get control of the project, but not due to Rocky's death. He got it because after he suggested the name (CentOS) and I approved it and it was then accepted by the others, he promised to hand over the domain name which he was squatting on to the Caos Foundation (a 501(c)3). Jump forward, Lance and the Centos web team had Red Hat trademark violations on the centos.org website and they alienated Red Hat's lega…
Nobody here or anywhere is trying to slander Rocky, or yourself. And everything I said (or others said) cannot be called a "rumor". Everything said is factually correct, there is just a disagreement on the interpretation of these facts.
I will be honest with you, every time I read something where you claim to be a "founder of CentOS", it irritates me, for a number of reasons.
1/ CentOS was not created in a short time. Ideas, source code and history were spread and shared over multiple years and from multiple projects, I tend to consider that "founders" are "recognized as", not "claimed to be". Yet you are very loud about shouting everywhere your "founder" status to promote your Linux distribution. All in all, this status of yours is the sole selling point of Rocky Linux.
2/ There is, IMHO, a difference between "being there during the foundation" and "being a founder". I value the work you did with Caos, but to me being there in 2002 does not make you a "founder".
3/ There is a meaning in the status of founder, it implies some legacy on the future success of the project. Bill gates is a legitimate founder of MSFT because even though he's not there anymore, he did put the company on a track for what it is today.
I do not agree that you have a legacy claim on CentOS' future success. You were let go of the org after 2 years (I know you see it as the board having been "manipulated" by Lance).
TLDR: I do not contest your contribution to CentOS in the early days. But I think calling yourself a "founder" is misleading, and is a borderline dishonest attempt at reaping the success of an org that earned 99% of its respect long after you were let go.
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Would you rather have `.rpm`s build by someone on the command line using `rpmbuild` or `mock` or something built by a CI with proper bootstraping and "nearer" to reproduceable builds. Also, by cutting corners on the CI, you risk introducing mild ABI problems which wont crash, but causes instabilities and potential security vulnerabilities. If they say they needed time to do it properly, I respect that.
I don't know how RHEL packages are built exactly, since I'm not an employee, but mock is what the Fedora infrastructure runs under koji for builds. I don't see how "a CI" can make the process "nearer to reproduceable builds", whatever that means. I'm not aware or serious efforts on reproducible builds for Fedora/EL, in contrast to Debian, though there has been talk of it. You obviously should never use rpmbuild for b…
About `mock`, the problem is the ABI. If you don't build the packages in the "perfect" order, the ABI degrades over time. For example, some libraries might accidentally add something in the middle of a struct. The API is 100% compatible. It will also run without any warning, but all pointers in the application using the libraries provided by those packages will now have an offset. A boolean might now point to in integer or something like this. If you don't have the tooling to detect this and don't have the tooling to ensure you build packages in the right order (and rebuild when needed), then you will eventually get some of these problems. Mostly on point releases. To solve this, the "trivial" way is to follow the RHEL build ordering, which requires some tools. The "correct" way is to use `libabigail`, `libsolv`, `libdnf` and other binary tooling and keep track of these things.
There are more of these little papercuts left and right you get when you build a RHEL clone. You can always cut corners and manually build everything, but you will payback the time you save in outages. RedHat has the test suite, the clones only have a small part of it, they have to be extra careful.
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> CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world. There really wasn't a CentOS world beyond that, because it wasn't a true community distribution. Red Hat never attempted to meaningful involve the community, all board members or whatever pretend org CentOS has are RH employees. There were never any kind of community elect…
There totally was. Facebook had been running CentOS long before Stream, and had several RPM backports to CentOS 7 on GitHub. And guess what, they love CentOS Stream. The default desktop distros for Facebook developers are Fedora and Stream. Honestly if all you know about CentOS is "download ISOs and report bugs that with some luck will be forwarded to RH Bugzilla", you don't know anything about the CentOS community.…
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I don't know how RHEL packages are built exactly, since I'm not an employee, but mock is what the Fedora infrastructure runs under koji for builds. I don't see how "a CI" can make the process "nearer to reproduceable builds", whatever that means. I'm not aware or serious efforts on reproducible builds for Fedora/EL, in contrast to Debian, though there has been talk of it. You obviously should never use rpmbuild for b…
For the record, I am not saying something is wrong with Alma. I am saying if Rocky says they need time to get it right, then I see this as a good sign. About `mock`, the problem is the ABI. If you don't build the packages in the "perfect" order, the ABI degrades over time. For example, some libraries might accidentally add something in the middle of a struct. The API is 100% compatible. It will also run without any w…
I've worked in software engineering for a long time. Sometimes delays are a good thing; A sign of waiting for quality. And sometimes they're a sign that things went wrong. That poor decisions were made, or implementation was slow due to junior people etc..
Interpreting 'need time to get this right' as a positive, and worse, as somehow a negative on Alma, who thrashed them to the finish line with an identical product, doesn't make sense.
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> doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff Why are you not considering PR/legal/community stuff as being worthy?
It would frighten me having Kurtzer doing legalities, given his bizarre legal theory on copyright specifically (no longer recorded in the issues of a deleted github repo for me to reference).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would frighten me having Kurtzer doing legalities, given his bizarre legal theory on copyright specifically (no longer recorded in the issues of a deleted github repo for me to reference).
Can you elaborate on my bizarre legal theory on copyrights? Thanks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how RHEL packages are built exactly, since I'm not an employee, but mock is what the Fedora infrastructure runs under koji for builds. I don't see how "a CI" can make the process "nearer to reproduceable builds", whatever that means. I'm not aware or serious efforts on reproducible builds for Fedora/EL, in contrast to Debian, though there has been talk of it. You obviously should never use rpmbuild for b…
For the record, I am not saying something is wrong with Alma. I am saying if Rocky says they need time to get it right, then I see this as a good sign. About `mock`, the problem is the ABI. If you don't build the packages in the "perfect" order, the ABI degrades over time. For example, some libraries might accidentally add something in the middle of a struct. The API is 100% compatible. It will also run without any w…