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> Under Red Hat control, CentOS no longer modeled RHEL production code but was marketed as a beta—a preview of what was coming down the pipe. Eventually, the company sunsetted the project entirely, and as a result, new copycats emerged. I thought CentOS was downstream of RHEL. Doesn't this describe what CentOS Stream became?
I was at Red Hat very early on. Red Hat has been remarkably consistent throughout its journey once it graduated from selling boxes of software at book stores (which was a necessary step). Red Hat only astook venture money once it was ready to go public and never before. The philosophy of Red Hat was to "make the pie bigger" and still largely is, therefore it supports open source first before anything else. This works…
> Red Hat created an industry and all of the successful enterprise Linux distros have followed its model to some extent or another (Canonical, SUSE, etc)
IBM created that industry, by lifting Linux into their supported platforms portfolio.
and the first Enterprise Linux ever was suse linux enterprise for s/390, followed by x86 releases at about the time RH released their first RHEL.
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This is correct. They still do this. They are the only ones. They go beyond just "hey, I know of a database that could handle that size" to "why are you storing this here? this is PII, this is analytical data, this is business data, here's a proposal for doing this with open source at scale". It's not just "buy our product". They go above and beyond the needs of the product to the needs of the customer, like you said…
what happened to SUSE? they were the same. are they no more?
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It was, but that changed as of RHEL 8. I suspect that AmazonLinux (also originally downstream of RHEL) caused Red Hat to reconsider this. I’m not sure why exactly. Perhaps Red Hat/IBM compete with Amazon in some space, or perhaps they felt that Amazon should release their patches.
The CentOS Stream transition was a shift from the "throw it over the wall" model of open source like Android to a more collaborative approach. Example: As a user of (original) CentOS, you discover a bug. Where do you report that bug? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux bug tracker, because CentOS is just a clone and the community has no real ability to fix things. Then what? You wait until a Red Hat employee gets around to…
CentOS Stream is the exact opposite of all of that, with no upside at all for this model. It will push numerous companies away from IBM RedHat entirely. Especially as it is widely seen as the start of IBM creating a bigger moat around RHEL, so there is little confidence that future clones of RHEL won't see a similar fate one way or another. And while finding a bug and not being sure who to report it to is bad, finding out that your Linux distro was buried by your maintainers half-way through the lifecycle and won't get any new updates would be disastrous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CentOS Stream transition was a shift from the "throw it over the wall" model of open source like Android to a more collaborative approach. Example: As a user of (original) CentOS, you discover a bug. Where do you report that bug? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux bug tracker, because CentOS is just a clone and the community has no real ability to fix things. Then what? You wait until a Red Hat employee gets around to…
This is only a very small benefit to CentOS Stream. Most users would never report bugs but still suffered the loss of a LTS CentOS.
Expected to see canonical model get mentioned in the article, combination of proprietary online services with opensource products. Well we know all of debate around it and the peculiarities of canonical, but I feel like it worths mentioning.
Reasons why people pay for Red Hat: 1. Customer support 2. Certifications 3. Vendor support I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat does. You don't use Red Hat because you want to, you use it because it's the only choice. Any business could do exactly the same thing, and do it better than Red Hat. But there's really not much reason for a customer to move away fr…
Oracle would technically be another one. They will even sell you Oracle Hardware (or Oracle cloud) to run your Oracle Linux. Of course there are many good reasons not to want to use Oracle for this.
Not sure about their revenue between different divisions, but they finished open-sourcing even the last proprietary part of their JDK, making OpenJDK the reference implementation, plus they finance 90+% of all its commits. They make some revenue from selling OracleJDK licenses (and even most of those are free if you stay on the latest version) which includes support. Many of their customers are on older Java versions though, for example their Java 8 support is valid for something like 2030, so mostly government, big enterprises.
(For some reason though, there is just endless bullshit around Java, even though the exact same model/license is true for the Linux kernel)