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Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#371

Post by cashsterling »

webmobdev wrote: post #363
Keverw wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me about how people don't even give CockroachDB a chance because of it's name. Every time it's mentioned on HN, people can't help but to bring up it's name.

Yeah, Cockroachdb - I don't like that name at all.

I love it... Cockroaches are survivors. When I was in grad school my lab was in a subbasement in a 100 year old building. We had huge cockroaches...

One of my colleagues caught some and put them in one of our lab freezers and forgot about them. Months later we remembered the jar... took it out of the freezer. Cockroaches thawed out and seemed to be fine... very active, almost like nothing happened.

Other experiments were performed as well... anyhow, cockroaches are hard to kill.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#372

Post by rnd0 »

flatline wrote: post #265
CivBase wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think CentOS ever intended to be IBM either.

I always thought it was more than a little incestuous for RH to acquire and maintain the RH clone, but it did fill a niche.

Centos was broke. Otherwise it's doubtful that they would have sold to Redhat.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#373

Post by wfuser »

znpy wrote: post #369
CoconutPilot wrote: post #296

Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. I think Rocky Linux needs to put out a plan how they will make themselves financially viable as we've had 3 high profile RHEL respins go down in the last 10 years. CentOS failed twice, it ran out of money in 2014 and was rescued back then by Redhat sponsership. Again in 2020. Another widely used RHEL respin was Scientific Linux which mothballed when RHEL 7 was releas…

> Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. nah, it's not missing. Red Hat bought the project and more importantly the trademark, domains etc. And it was mostly fine. Then IBM bought Red Hat and things went south. CentOS did not fail, CentOS was killed . It's different.

> Then IBM bought Red Hat and things went south.

I think IBM had nothing to do with this one. People think Red Hat won't do anything like this. However, there exists a part of Red Hat which is capable of doing this. That part of Red Hat usually stays behind the scenes and comes to the fore to announce that a decision has been made and the developers (hired within Red Hat as well as the general community) who are involved in the day to day running of the projects will have no say. Plus they will throw in some confusion (like the limited use license that is in the works but not yet ready for CentOS use) around the future of the project being killed just to let the community expect something good to come out of this exercise. This is not new. They did the exact same thing to the JBoss community application server[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358847

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#374

Post by Groxx »

wfuser wrote: post #360
tux wrote: post #196

I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Good to see that CentOS cofonder picked this up and now became a founder of Rocky Linux. This shows dedication and rock solid background. Rocky Linux will be a project to follow, help and use in production environment. Thank you for all your hard work!

> I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.

Or the weirdly mis-spelled version of "googol" that's just going to make people think "goggle" or "ogle".

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#375

Post by asddubs »

znpy wrote: post #368
tinus_hn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same happens with GIMP, it’s just not smart marketing.

in GIMP's defense, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, whereas names as Red Hat, Ubuntu and many others are not acronyms

to be fair to red hat and ubuntu, those names don't have multiple inappropriate meanings

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#376

Post by mbreese »

em500 wrote: post #362
dralley wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think I'm wrong, just put up a mirror of the RHEL8 (not CentOS8) SRPMs and see how long it stays up. Clearly they're not acting in the spirit of the GPL, even if they are in the letter. The GPL doesn't require you make the sources public to everybody , just the people to whom you are distributing your software. But Red Hat does provide sources, to everybody . They go above and beyond what the GPL actually re…

The ftp site does not contain sources for RHEL 8 (it's just sources for a bunch of add-on packages). The RHEL 8 sources are in git.centos.org, though not in SRPM form. I know that GPL only requires Red Hat to provide sources on request to those receiving their binaries. But in principle the receiver can then legally redistribute those sources. Now AFAICT nobody's actually doing that redistributing. I don't know wheth…

RedHat has to permit the redistribution per the GPL. But there is nothing stating that your support contract can’t be cancelled if you do it. (I don’t have any first hand knowledge of this, just a guess).

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#377

Post by geerlingguy »

wfuser wrote: post #360
tux wrote: post #196

I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Good to see that CentOS cofonder picked this up and now became a founder of Rocky Linux. This shows dedication and rock solid background. Rocky Linux will be a project to follow, help and use in production environment. Thank you for all your hard work!

> I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.

Same here. Things that come to mind: Rocky, the champion boxer who can "go the distance" and never gives up... the Rocky Mountains, which are, well, rocky and strong... Rocky Road ice cream, which tastes good.

A zillion times better than trying to explain what a "Suse", an "Ubuntu", or a "Manjaro" is, and that's before talking about the various types of hat-based distros.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#378

Post by rpcwork »

Keverw wrote: post #335
tux wrote: post #196

I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Good to see that CentOS cofonder picked this up and now became a founder of Rocky Linux. This shows dedication and rock solid background. Rocky Linux will be a project to follow, help and use in production environment. Thank you for all your hard work!

Reminds me about how people don't even give CockroachDB a chance because of it's name. Every time it's mentioned on HN, people can't help but to bring up it's name.

Requesting the name change to the more subtle “RoachDB”

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#379

Post by acdha »

ghaff wrote: post #338
acdha wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the value pitch for RHEL, where it's understandable — whether or not you like the enterprise IT model of avoiding upgrades as long as possible, there's a ton of money in it. I think the gap is the question of how many people there are who want enterprise-style lifetimes but don't actually want support. If you're running servers which don't need a paid support contract, upgrading Debian every 5 years is hardly…

>who want enterprise-style lifetimes but don't actually want support But lifetimes are support. Support isn't just, or even primarily, about making a phone call and saying "Help, it's broken." After all, there's nothing keeping someone from taking a snapshot of a codebase and running it unchanged for 10 years. Probably not a good idea if you're connected to the network, but certainly possible.

I was thinking more about _why_ people want that. If you're changing the system regularly, upgrading is valuable because you don't want to spend your time dealing with old software or backporting newer versions. Most of the scenarios where you do want that are long-term commercial operations where you need to deal with requirements for software which isn't provided by the distribution, and in those cases they likely do want a support contract.

I'm not sure there are enough people left who have the “don't touch it for a decade” mindset, aren't working in a business environment where they're buying RHEL/SuSE/Amazon Linux/etc. anyway, and are actually going to contribute to the community. 100% of the people I know who used it were doing so because they needed to support RHEL systems but wanted to avoid paying for licenses on every server and they weren't exactly jumping to help the upstream.

Red Hat bought CentOS in the first place because they were having trouble attracting volunteer labor and I think that any successor needs to have a good story for why the same dynamic won't repeat a second time.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#380

Post by mbreese »

dotancohen wrote: post #318
CoconutPilot wrote: post #296

Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. I think Rocky Linux needs to put out a plan how they will make themselves financially viable as we've had 3 high profile RHEL respins go down in the last 10 years. CentOS failed twice, it ran out of money in 2014 and was rescued back then by Redhat sponsership. Again in 2020. Another widely used RHEL respin was Scientific Linux which mothballed when RHEL 7 was releas…

> Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. CentOS did not fail. CentOS was a wild success. Like the vast majority of tech success storeis, CentOS was picked up by a major player and turned against its roots to protect the incumbent moneymaker. But the terrific thing about the GPL, for all its flaws and despite its crazy founder, is that it ensures the health and longevity of a project despite well-funded at…

It failed... it is not able to sustain itself.

Whatever replaces it either needs a better business model (to pay for maintenance, RHEL, Ubuntu) or more community involvement (work for free, Debian). But when you’re effectively repackaging another distro, it’s probably hard to get other people excited enough to help.

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