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June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

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Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#191

Post by jahlove »

op00to wrote: post #160
forkicks wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promising to support an OS for 10 years then cutting that support to just 2 out of the blue?

The question I’m trying to answer is who promised what, where was that published, and when was it published. If a squirrel promised me 10 years of support, that’s different than a CentOS maintainer making that same promise on the wiki.

The 10 years of support on CentOS 8 was published on centos.org's wiki:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

Red Hat's explanation was something along the lines that it was a wiki and not guaranteed to be accurate? I don't think editing was open to to people outside of the CentOS org.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#192

Post by josephcsible »

heywoodlh wrote: post #17
keikobadthebad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be specific? Else it sounds like you're just FUDding it.

My understanding is that since Red Hat restricted the source availability for RHEL, Rocky is using the following loopholes to gain binary compatibility with RHEL: 1. Using OCI images of RHEL (i.e. on Docker Hub) 2. Using cloud server images of RHEL They outlined their plans for this in June of 2023[0]. Red Hat’s official stance is that downstream distros like Rocky or AlmaLinux should be basing off of CentOS Stream —…

IBM's official route results in a distro that is not bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, at least not without a lot of unnecessary work. The route Rocky is taking results in a distro that is bug-for-bug compatible.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#193

Post by josephcsible »

mrweasel wrote: post #48
phpisthebest wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see what separates Alma from CentOS Stream at this point The entire Propose of CentOS was Binary Compatibility with RHEL, largely for Vendor compliance reasons, if a vendor of a commercial software product validated RHEL 7 for their software running CentOS 7 was also supported Running CentOS Stream, or now Alma Linux would not be as their are no longer binary compatible with RHEL. the Hostility of IBM and R…

> if you are running ERP Systems, LOB Apps, or other critical functions that measure their code life in decades That's really what confuses me about the people who use CentOS or Rocky, they want or need the stability of RHEL, so that they can run these crucial applications, that mostly aren't cheap, yet they refuse to pay for the development of the operating system they run it them? I really don't see the point in an…

> the people who use CentOS or Rocky, they want or need the stability of RHEL, so that they can run these crucial applications

No, the people who need the stability of RHEL were already paying for it. The people who used CentOS were doing so to be able to develop and test software that would eventually be used by people running RHEL.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#194

Post by dralley »

orthoxerox wrote: post #182
dralley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL is not "effectively closed source" by any stretch of the imagination. The sources are available as CentOS Stream -- from which RHEL is built in the first place!! It is true that, in order to put together an exact copy of RHEL, you would need to do a bit of work to figure out exactly what versions RHEL uses, and specifically pick those versions out of CentOS Stream. It isn't as simple as downloading the entire tr…

If you provide GPL software to your customers, you have to provide everything they need to build this exact version yourself, not point them at a repo and tell them to figure it out.

Red Hat does provide all of that to RHEL customers. This is a discussion about what non-RHEL customers get.

Even non-customers are provided with all of the sources they they could use to build RHEL, given some additional effort. It's less trivial than it used to be, but not particularly difficult.

Alma takes the approach of reconstructing RHEL using these public sources, Rocky takes the approach of buying AWS VMs running RHEL for a few minutes at a time so that they can download RHEL sources as a "customer" while only paying a few dollars a month to do so.

The point is, even non-customers can rebuild RHEL using sources made publicly available by Red Hat if they so desire. It's not "effectively closed source", even to them.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#195

Post by stonogo »

tuna74 wrote: post #167
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

It seems that page was written by Christoph Galuschka which was not an Red Hat employee at that time.

Christoph is a volunteer, but definitely part of the CentOS team, and in fact was a member of the wiki admin group: https://web.archive.org/web/20200721015106/https://wiki.cent....

I suppose people are trying to claim this wasn't actual CentOS policy, but it was, and when the project abruptly decided to truncate eight years of announced support, at no point did anyone involved deny this was a change.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#196

Post by josephcsible »

dralley wrote: post #63
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Red Hat’s official stance is that downstream distros like Rocky or AlmaLinux should be basing off of CentOS Stream — that would allow all the EL distributions to contribute and use the same OS base That stance goes contrary to the "everyone benefits" nature of free and open source software. It turns "everyone benefits" into "Red Hat / IBM profits". Why should the community contribute to Red Hat's bottom line if Re…

Your analysis seems to be ignoring all of the work required to create and maintain the CentOS Stream / RHEL distribution in the first place, which is substantial. Prior to CentOS Stream, if you were a CentOS user or maintainer who experienced a bug, your only option was to file a bug on the RHEL bug tracker and wait for a Red Hat employee to fix it for you. It was the Android-esque "throw the code over the wall" mode…

Prior to CentOS Stream, couldn't you file the bug in the upstream project's bug tracker instead, and then still do all of the other stuff you said?

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#197

Post by dessimus »

angry_moose wrote: post #94
bluedino wrote: post #56

For better or for worse, this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support. Many have started to offer Ubuntu support in it's place. Most of them didn't even try to support stream. I'm not sure what the process behind that was. CentOS was free, which is why we used it. Sure, our SAP boxes run RHEL but the other stuff doesn't. We started moving a lot of stuff to Ubuntu as well. Now, Ubuntu is by no…

> Additionally, Red Hat support is so bad these days. It almost reminds me of Microsoft Technet forums of the past. Random 'techs' offering copy-paste solutions and the same bad information. Yeah, that's been my experience. We had a bad driver package from them completely hose one of our prod systems. It took 3 days and multiple calls from our CTO to get anyone to seriously look at the issue despite being on the top…

The SLA is to respond within X hours, not resolve. So when the SE sends an email that says: "I'm the owner of the case and will reach out after looking at the notes." They have complied with the SLA.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#198

Post by dralley »

josephcsible wrote: post #196
dralley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis seems to be ignoring all of the work required to create and maintain the CentOS Stream / RHEL distribution in the first place, which is substantial. Prior to CentOS Stream, if you were a CentOS user or maintainer who experienced a bug, your only option was to file a bug on the RHEL bug tracker and wait for a Red Hat employee to fix it for you. It was the Android-esque "throw the code over the wall" mode…

Prior to CentOS Stream, couldn't you file the bug in the upstream project's bug tracker instead, and then still do all of the other stuff you said?

You'd still have to wait for someone at Red Hat to backport the fix themselves. There wasn't really a way to actually participate in the engineering of CentOS itself.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#200

Post by tux1968 »

dralley wrote: post #189
tux1968 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so the source is 100% freely available. And with that source, and nothing else, you are able to regenerate RHEL binaries. Rocky Linux contends they are not doing anything illegal in the methods used to obtain the source code (ie. legally renting an RHEL VM from any number of providers, and downloading the SRPMS). Maybe Red Hat wishes this was illegal, but I still haven't heard anyone claim that it is.

I'm not claiming that either, so what's your point. I'm just saying that the way Rocky presents it is mostly marketing. The cleverness is to save themselves effort, not to do something they weren't being allowed to do previously.

I'm not sure why you weighed in on the subject then, other than to advance your own personal preference. At least, I mistook it as an objection to Rocky Linux's very existence. As long as what they're doing is legal, then let them be. Each distribution will rise and fall based on the value it provides.
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