[BozemanLUG] Regarding RHEL / CentOS announcement today

[David Eder]

The announcement was good timing for us.  We were just starting to think about migrating to CentOS 8.  Migration is a slow process for us.  We just recently celebrated the death of our last CentOS 4 install, followed a few months later by the last CentOS 5 install.  We have a lot of CentOS 6 installs out there.  So what this really means is that we continue with CentOS 7 until the dust settles.  We still have a few years left of security updates.

The thing that concerns me with the Stream is that it might be unstable.  New features are great, unless they break stuff.  They also say that if you want a "production" environment you should call Redhat.

So, we'll take it slow.  If it's more stable than Fedora, it should still be a win.

There's a story about a town having a garbage worker strike.  One worker decided instead, to go from neighborhood to neighborhood doing what he could collecting the trash.  He would eventually get to everyone, but that wasn't good enough.  The town made a villain out of the one worker because those that didn't get picked up as early were envious.  That's often the plight of Open Source projects.  When one person does a lot, but doesn't get your needs fast enough, then everybody turns on them.  It's sad really because they turn against the only one that is there to help.

So whatever the fate of CentOS, whether it meets our future needs or not, we have benefited greatly from their efforts.  The same goes for the individual projects that are part of the collective whole.

That being said, I'm sure the real problem with everything and anything is systemd.

David.

December 8, 2020 8:46 PM, "Scott Dowdle" <dowdle at montanalinux.org> wrote:

> 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
> 704 Church Street
> Belgrade, MT 59714
> (406)388-0827 [home]
> (406)994-3931 [work]
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at bozemanlug.org
> http://lists.bozemanlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss