[BozemanLUG] Regarding RHEL / CentOS announcement today

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

Just in case anyone wondered what I thought about the announcement today... I wrote a blog post:
https://www.montanalinux.org/centos-8-rhel-and-centos-stream-20201208.html

I see making CentOS Stream into RHELs upstream definitely has some advantages... namely removing the barrier that was there between the RHEL devs and the CentOS devs.  This is really going to open up and make RHEL development more transparent... at least with regards to minor point releases.  It remains to be seen how this will impact development of major releases.

The dropping, with a 1 year notice, of CentOS 8 and shifting all of the focus to Stream is troubling for a many people... but I believe Stream will be good enough for the vast majority of use cases.  If you need better than that, you really should be paying for support.

How many other FOSS projects could promise to support something for 10 years?  How many could give you a 1 year notice of going down?  More often than not, many non-financed or under-financed projects ended up closing their doors with little to no notice.  Same goes for commercial, closed source software.

There is a large uproar but I think a lot of it has to do with so many people being somewhat on edge with the uncertainty we have been since the beginning of the year... and another straw thrown on the camel... and they are quick to judgement and voicing negativity.  We'll have to see how it pans out.

As for me, I have no plans of switching from CentOS any time soon.  There is a growing resistance movement trying to influence Red Hat to reverse the decision.  Is there a chance they will do so?  I doubt it.  Red Hat just said they are directing their financial support in a new, specific direction but that doesn't mean that the community can't pick up the slack and provide whatever needed support might be needed to keep CentOS 8 (non-stream) going.  Will that happen?  I doubt it.  The CentOS dev team has always been a small number of very dedicated, hard working folks and they really haven't gotten a whole lot of actionable support from the "community" including myself.  Will an alternative project spring up work on a new, community-based rebranded RHEL clone?  I doubt it.  Maybe Scentific Linux will decide to pick up 8.  We'll have to see.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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