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A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

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Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#111

Post by Accujack »

_jal wrote: post #10

RedHat's goodwill will be spent down over the next decade or so, and eventually I fully expect to think of them the same way I do IBM. (Which is, roughly, the same way I think of Oracle.) All of the people I deal with there are the same as before the acquisition, so things have not changed much for me personally, yet. But I am looking at building replacements for certain tools we depend on; the writing is on the wall…

This is (at present) a standard progression in the life cycle of a corporation in the US. There are vanishingly few corporations left who practice a business model designed to span more than about 30 years.

Most businesses today are founded, then the founders are bought out/merged, getting cash in the process.

Then the new owners change things to effectively profit on the business at the expense of longevity, which causes discontent in users and starts the slow downhill slide to the product's death. Then as the product becomes less relevant and loses market share cuts are made to preserve profitability and lower ongoing costs.

Once the business has extracted all the value from the product, they then drop the product entirely but retain the IP for it, preventing anyone else from resurrecting it, thus suppressing competition.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#112

Post by abruzzi »

rhodysurf wrote: post #68
ehayes wrote: post #47

Am I the only one who doesn't get the "risk using CentOS Stream" stuff? Isn't it going to be slightly-less stable RHEL? I actually worked at Red Hat a few years back and almost all work was released upstream-first. The one time I fixed something security-related, the fix was still made upstream first, but just embargoed until the fix was made and released for downstream versions. If I recall correctly, we pushed the…

I worked in defense for a while. Every DoD contractor is locked to RHEL version that their DoD targets use as end users. But they don’t need to pay for RHEL support currently because they all just use CentOS instead. This forces all of those companies to finally pay up, which they will def not be happy about.

This genuinely surprises me. When I moved into enterprise 15 years ago, I was more inclined to use free things and piece everything together myself. This quickly overwhelmed me, and I learned the golden rule of enterprise--nothing without a support contract.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#113

Post by indymike »

The only place I run into RHEL or CentOS is maintaining old PHP apps where the web host is running someone's control panel... Often times, it's like stepping into a time machine because it's pretty obvious that things haven't been updated in quite some time. I'm not sure that a 10 year promise of stability is one we want kept (security patches, etc...)

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#114

Post by milesvp »

SloopJon wrote: post #46

I somehow missed that Red Hat started sponsoring CentOS a while back, and owns the trademarks. I mean, money and cooperation is great and all, but how could anyone have expected CentOS Linux to continue for long when Red Hat has such a fundamental conflict of interest? Edit: here's the HN post at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7019914

To be fair, I truly thought MySQL was dead in the water when Oracle purchased them 12 years ago, but as far as I can tell MySQL continues to be well supported with new features being added. So I no longer know what to think about these kinds of acquisitions.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#115

Post by mixmastamyk »

darksaints wrote: post #88

The future of operating systems, at least from a non-GUI perspective, is going to look a lot like SeL4 + Nix. A rock-hard provably secure capabilities-oriented kernel, combined with reproducible declarative package management that can handle any combination of dependencies that you want. Essentially this means that the idea of different distributions for LTS, stable, beta, alpha, bleeding edge, etc., goes away comple…

Sounds good, but unless there’s a developer and end-user product approaching the maturity of BlueHat or even Debian it doesn’t seem likely to happen.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#116

Post by mixmastamyk »

indymike wrote: post #113

The only place I run into RHEL or CentOS is maintaining old PHP apps where the web host is running someone's control panel... Often times, it's like stepping into a time machine because it's pretty obvious that things haven't been updated in quite some time. I'm not sure that a 10 year promise of stability is one we want kept (security patches, etc...)

The whole reason for the distro family to exist is for security patches.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#117

Post by mixmastamyk »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #108
mixmastamyk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you update often it turns out to be less work, because more gets automated and changes are smaller. This is the CI/CD proposition anyway.

Except when the update brings some kind of massive change. RHEL 6->7, for example, was when systemd became the norm, and so right around the time our customers started upgrading, I suddenly had the hot potato dropped into my lap of needing to convert 20 years' worth of our software's init.d scripts into systemd services.

Debian, Ubuntu handled those side by side for a while, surprised RH didn’t.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#118

Post by dralley »

dralley wrote: post #81
masklinn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Fedora already the RHEL upstream? Why not just kill CentOS entirely?

No, Fedora and CentOS Stream are very very different. Fedora is where new and shiny lands, with a release schedule of every 6 months, and ~1 year of support per version, with minimal backporting of bugfixes and frequent package updates. Lots of packages (including the kernel) update freely. That would not fly in CentOS. CentOS Stream is the next minor version of RHEL. There is lots of backporting patches, ABI stabili…

Or to put it another way, Fedora is (roughly, with caveats) the upstream for new major releases of RHEL, but CentOS Stream is upstream for minor releases of RHEL.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#119

Post by q3k »

zemo wrote: post #89
q3k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle multiple versions of the same project/software/deployment on the same machine?

each version of the project gets a directory and contains everything the project needs. put all of those into a parent directory. use a symlink to point to the currently active version. E.g.: /usr/local/thing/versions/thing-v1.3.7 /usr/local/thing/versions/thing-v1.4.2 /usr/local/thing/current -> /usr/local/thing/versions/thing-v1.3.7

I mean, sure, I've done this too with a handful of scripts. But is this something you do via .debs? I'm asking specifically about how to handle this with plain Debian/Ubuntu packaging.

Re: A Brief Goodbye to CentOS

#120

Post by arp242 »

ben509 wrote: post #13

I wasn't clear what's changing that is so problematic, so to summarize this post[1] and various comments: CentOS Stream will track ahead of RHEL and thus will be more like a beta channel, losing the stability guarantees that CentOS users depended on. [1]: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

IMO CentOS stream isn't problematic as such, and neither is CentOS "classic" switching to stream; distros evolve all the time. The basic idea of stream seems like a decent one as such. Some may not like it, but that's okay. In my opinion, the problematic part is that the EOL date of CentOS 8, released last year, suddenly shifted from 2029 to 2021.

For years CentOS promised long-term stability and "boringness", which was its main selling point. A very long support cycle was its main selling point. It's why people installed CentOS, and now, suddenly, that's gone.

I don't think it matters that it's free in this case; they made a commitment/promise and suddenly went back on that. I wonder what all the sponsors[1] think of this; I'd be pretty darn peeved if I would sponsor something like CentOS, and it suddenly shifted direction like this.

[1]: https://www.centos.org/sponsors/

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