23 thoughts on - Blog Article: CentOS Is NOT Dead

• ‘might’ doesn’t mean ‘is’, there the “terminus techicus” ‘dead’ is korrekt

  “CentOS Stream intends to be as stable as RHEL”

  and where is the 10 year update support?

  the last update of CentOS Stream will be in the year 2024

  and do you really think it is worth the work to migrate to CentOS Stream, when knowing to have this work again in less than 4 years?

  Walter

• Il 2020-12-14 13:07 Nicolas Kovacs ha scritto:

  While interesting, I think the blog post fails to identify the the main issue with Stream:
  – Stream can be updated many times each days. You basically have a non-stop incoming flow of updates;
  – as far I know, Stream does not have (and will not have)
  “synchronization points” with mail RHEL;
  – the support window is much shorter (ie: 2024 vs 2029).

  Anyone relying on RHEL/CentOS to be kABI compatible can be severely impacted by the first two points (it’s difficult planning updates with rolling releases, when the kernel version can change from a day to another), while the third one (shorter support window) affect anyone.

  Basically it seems to me that Stream will be to RHEL the same Rawhide is to normal Fedora releases. While this has the potential to be a good move, it should be offered *in addition* to normal CentOS releases –
  which effectively are a different product.

  That said I am grateful to all the volunteers that made CentOS possible, and I don’t want the above to be taken as a rant – they only are my
  (possibly wrong) opinions.

  Regards.

• Nicolas Kovacs

  As others have said, it misses the _really_ important bit about the traditional CentOS model which is to follow the RHEL ~10 year life cycle

  It doesn’t matter how good/rock solid/whatever CentOS Stream turns out to be, but if it only has a 5 year life cycle for each major release, then it no good to me (and I suspect many others)

  The article also mentions “CentOS will no longer be old, crusty, and barely alive, trailing RHEL by months at times” – then why didn’t Redhat put resources into CentOS to improve that?

  Redhat must have known, that if they killed off traditional CentOS, then users will simply go elsewhere for a RHEL rebuild ?

  I agree that Redhat really screwed up this announcement – they would have got a lot more kudos if they had announced CentOS Stream to exist along with keeping the current traditional CentOS …

  James Pearson

• Le 14/12/2020 à 15:25, James Pearson a écrit :

  I totally agree with you.

  But when you disagree with someone (e.g. the CentOS team), it’s good at least to hear the person out.

  Back at the university here in Montpellier, we had a funny exercise in one of the courses. Every one of us had to pick a subject where he or she had a strong position. I remember I chose nuclear energy, which I think is a bad choice. And in the exercise, I had to *defend* nuclear energy against its opponents.

  And I published the link to the article because it’s a fine text and nicely argumented.

  Cheers,

  Niki

  —
  Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
  7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
  Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

• least of strong choice. And nicely

  Well, it’s mostly emotional (the leitmotif: “how can you say CentOS
  Stream is bad if you didn’t try it?”). And the author’s bio spoils the fun, as well:

  “Ben Porter is a Linux and open source advocate, currently working as an OpenShift consultant for Red Hat.”

  And the comments to the graphs, where RHEL, CentOS and Fedora are placed on a line, are simply ridiculous (such as “did you use to consider RHEL
  to be the CentOS beta?”). With all due respect to Ben Porter, it didn’t convince me.

  —
  Sincerely,

  Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)

• I have posted a comment that explains why and on which topic he is wrong. You post them and I will debunk them :-)

  —
  Ljubomir Ljubojevic
  (Love is in the Air)
  PL Computers Serbia, Europe

  StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant

• cycle
  […]

  Well, arguing with you in that Medium blog would be counter-productive:
  – as far as I see, we share similar viewpoints on CentOS situation
  – your response is very detailed, it would make little sense elaborating it

  —
  Sincerely,

  Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)

• “Nicolas Kovacs” wrote:

  The article states that CentOS will now be “upstream” of RHEL instead of “downstream”.

  This is strange to me. I never thought CentOS was upstream or downstream of RHEL; I always thought it *was* RHEL — perhaps a little delayed, but that’s not the same as being “downstream”.

  It’s also clear that Red Hat didn’t understand the importance of the
  10-year support period.

• Hi,

  But that’s also part of the problem for Red Hat, at least that’s my impression and I can understand why.

  I _could_ probably live with CentOS Stream for the benefit of all even if it’s not 100% identical to RHEL but as stable as it, _but_, only if they extend the maintenance period to the same 10 years analog to RHEL.

  @Red Hat, do you hear our voices?

  Regards, Simon

• Oh, but they did do that. Last year, when CentOS 8 was announced Stream was announced alongside it. The screw up here was in killing off CentOS Linux by decree from Red Hat with a bunch of spin about how we’re all better off for it.

• one called “[CentOS]
  https://blog.CentOS.org/2020/12/future-is-CentOS-stream/” where CentOS
  and redhat are talking with the users, developers (like the bloke who does epel), and supporters about the changes. I would say that means people are discussing that in the list. If you missed that, please look for it in the mail archive.

  its paywall and how it controls what users get to see; I can provide a link to what a group who left it wrote if you want. But, for the sake of hearing you out, I opened the doc in a browser in incognito mode. In it the author states

  ‘CentOS will no longer be old, crusty, and barely alive, trailing RHEL
  by months at times.’

  First, the word choice in that sentence, which prevails the article, is anything but nicely argumented as you put it. Second, CentOS stream will have some patches before RHES but the security patches will be done *after* RHES. In my book that sounds like it checks the
  “trailing RHEL by months at times” box where it counts. So, his pretty drawing is very innaccurate.

  Further down the author tells us that “IBM did not do this. The CentOS
  governing board, some of which work for Red Hat, did this.” Thanks to the “[CentOS] https://blog.CentOS.org/2020/12/future-is-CentOS-stream/”
  thread it became known that redhat told the CentOS steering committee that CentOS was changing and they — CentOS committee — had the option to vote to approve those changes — unanimously — while redhat reserved the right to overrule the entire voting. To understand the significance of this, we need to remember what the “C” in CentOS stand for: community.

  The author also states “This was not done intentionally. It is also water under the bridge.” I would like to focus on the last sentence. That sounds very final and implies the “C” in CentOS matters little
  (refer to my previous comment on the decision process).

  Then the author goes on and says ‘If you are someone who is thinking,
  “CentOS is now just the RHEL beta,” please ask yourself, did you use to consider RHEL to be the CentOS beta? If not, you shouldn’t be thinking that now about CentOS.’ Like in other parts of this “nicely argumented article” the author is very condescending, implying anyone who does not agree with his point is a nitwit. In fact, his “The way software makes it in is the same. It just hits CentOS first instead of RHEL first” statement is misleading because of the security patches case I pointed earlier.

  Another of the author’s points is that “[…] if RHEL is the gold standard of stability (which many would suggest it is) then why would CentOS Stream, a distro effectively taking its place in the line-up, be less stable?” That clashes with what Chris Wright, the Red Hat CTO
  stated

  “To be exact, CentOS Stream is an upstream development platform for ecosystem developers. It will be updated several times a day. This is not a production operating system.”
  (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201212012342/https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/transforming-development-experience-within-CentOS)

  Further down the author argues ‘It’s no secret that CentOS competes with RHEL. I’ve personally heard CTOs tell Red Hat salespeople, “why should I buy RHEL when I can use CentOS for free?” I die inside when I
  hear that. It is a fair and good question, but asking it tends to fire up a salesperson and gives them direct financial reasons to hate on CentOS.’ If that is the case, that shows Red Hat salespeople need some training; there is a RH partner who commented out recently in the list that his company has no issues helping groups with not enough budget to use CentOS, understanding its limitations, and upselling those who need the commercial version because of the support (last time I used the RHES support it was quite good).

• There is a 2 year overlap with the next version of stream as well .. in this case CentOS Stream 9. How long is Debian or Ubuntu LTS maintained for free?

  5 years may not be long enough for you .. but it certainly pretty long. And I am TRYING to get that extended. I may not be successful, we’ll have to see.

  Do you have any idea how much money Red Hat is paying to maintain CentOS. And they are maintaining CentOS 7, even now, until 2024. There are dozens of machines and several administrators to maintain them.

  If you chose not to use CentOS Stream, that is up to you. What is the OS of your TV set. What is the firmware of your computer. Those things are now pretty much irrelevant and commoditized.

  At some point the underlying OS is going to be much less important and the important part will be the layered parts that contain your apps and not the OS Layer.

  If you want a RHEL clone, that’s fine. There will be one available. Someone will make one.

  The real and complete vision of what CentOS Stream will become will not be compolete until around the end of QTR1 2021. If you chose not to try it, that is up to you. I truly think Stream will be a much better and more quickly fixed OS when everything is in place.

  Again .. pay 8 or more people the going rate to just maintain CentOS. Buy the dozens of machines and pay for the datacenter, bandwidth, hardware services for machines, etc. This is very expensive. Maybe the company you work for will do that out of the goodness of their heart?

  As bummed out as I am about this whole situation, and believe me i am. But even I can clearly see that Red Hat has gone above and beyond the requirements of open source software and I am quite tired of all the
  ‘they should be happy to pay several million dollars a year to give away a working product.” If it is so easy or cheap to do .. then you guys do it. I did it for 17 years. Much of my time was on top of a normal 40
  hour work week.

  Red Hat contributes to every major upstream project .. they maintain several very key major projects. They let employees contribute to projects and pay for them to work on upstream projects. how many things do they have to do for free?

• I don’t expect you to answer Johnny, but why didn’t Red Hat wait until Stream was “complete'” or ready, or whatever.

  I guess I don’t understand. Isn’t Red Hat going to pay for CentOS Stream engineers, hardware, etc? How much more would it be to use them to build point releases? Won’t much of the personnel and infrastructure be the same?
  Is Red Hat going to just get rid of all the CentOS resources? I don’t understand why the resources maintaining CentOS 7, and 8 Stream, can’t be used to build CentOS 8.4/5 etc?

  As bummed out as I am about this whole situation, and believe me i am. Again, we all appreciate it. It’s not you we’re mad at.

  I understand all your points, and I get it, but the fact is Red Hat committed to the roadmap (c.f. https://blog.CentOS.org/2019/07/ibm-red-hat-and-CentOS/) and now they’re abruptly breaking a promise. One that is affecting a lot of already overstressed and underpaid people. If they said this would happen at the beginning of CentOS 8, or better CentOS 9, then fine. But now?

  It sucks big time.

• I have no idea. I am not saying I completely agree with the timing or the way this went down. But we are where we are now. I still think CentOS Stream is as good as any other “Enterprise” distro out there. I
  think iti si just as good as Debian and/or Ubuntu.

  You guys keep calling it beta .. it is not.

  The RHEL team is not grabbing brand new software (like the do in Rawhide, for example) and trying to roll that into RHEL. They are going to do one of three type of updates.

  1) A security update

  2) A bugfix update.

  3) An Enhancement update.

  For #1 and #2 .. you want those rolled in and you want them rolled in ASAP. RHEAs do not make up that many of the updates. You are getting these after QA testing a couple months early at most.

  Yes, it will not exactly match RHEL .. but how different is 8.2 to 8.3
  .. what things run in 8.2 and not 8.3? That is the kind of updates you will be getting.

• This is the problem they created, your right stream is “just as good as the other Enterprise distro’s out there.” But that is part of the issue, since your just as good and no longer have the long support cycles then I just as well spend time porting it to Debian etc. The way that they did it just leaves a lot of bad faith in anything that RH has to say now, at least for me I have lost all trust in anything they have to say. I mean you know it’s bad when people are talking about migrating to Oracle, that’s pretty ironic of all things.

  I’ve been on the list since 2007 and again I appreciate all the hard work over the years that you and the others have given to the project, it’s just a shame that RH decided to take the path that it taken.

• I know the above wasn’t directed at me, but maybe  it wasn’t as much redhat wanting to sell, but IBM wanting to buy (there is a difference).

  IBM’s revenue has steadily and steeply been going down, it had quite a few train wrecks, topped off with plane crashes. IBM is still a very large company, and still makes A LOT of money but for a large part with a bunch of dinosaurs that they are stuck with, and someone spotted a meteor.

  CentOS mailing list CentOS@CentOS.org https://lists.CentOS.org/mailman/listinfo/CentOS

• Once IBM owns it?  You think?  They allowed cloning once ..  a long time ago.

• How many people have to tell you this had nothing to do with IBM? You sure have a lot of inside information.

• Johnny Hughes:

  I don’t use Debian or Ubuntu LTS, so have no idea

  Why not just have CentOS Stream revert to using whatever RPMS are released for the matching RHEL major release when it is in the maintenance part of its lifecycle?

  James Pearson

• Even out side the maintenance phase .. there will be some bugs that will get incorporated into the next point release. Those should be in Stream first.

  There will never be another ‘downstream rhel source code build’ done by Red Hat. This is just not in the cards.

• Yes, but the ones that were in the “current” point release were in Stream earlier, right? Is it really that hard to just label them as such (and maybe not delete them from the repo) ?

  Noam

• CentOS has always been ‘downstream’ of RHEL.

• Yes and no. Yes, in a sense that RedHat always meticulously followed requirements of GPL, and was putting sources of their “derivative” work of backporting as srpms. And “paid” meant putting effort into correctly rebuilding everything, so yes, what we used (roughly called “binary replica” if RHEL) in fact was paid by downstream vendors’ efforts.

  No, in a sense, RedHat never had, and shouldn’t have been expecting being paid for just following GPL letter and having source RPMs freely available. A always praised them for always following GPL.

  With utmost respect,

  And fully agreeing with the rest of your post,

  Valeri