What is going on here https://blog.CentOS.org/2020/12/future-is-CentOS-stream/
CentOS 8’s future is not looking bright. Recently deployed CentOS8 on my production workload and now hearing this. What do other folks think about this?
80 thoughts on - CentOS 8 Future
Speaking only for myself, I am ready to give up on CentOS (and Red Hat)
entirely. Fedora meets all my clients’ needs with none of the chaos.
I shall miss the stability of past CentOS releases, much as I did those of Scientific Linux.
–Doc Savage
Fairview Heights, IL
same here, I used CentOS because it is ‘that close’ to redhat, and that what I use at work/HPC, but easy to install etc in home environments while practically having the same thing. I guess I need to tell my employer I need the same thing now.
I definitely appreciate the vote of confidence in Fedora! You’re not alone in using Fedora in a lot of serious ways.
However, I really encourage everyone to give this a chance. This is
(post-Fedora) RHEL development opening up in a new way, and CentOS is central to it. That’s a good place to be!
Am 09.12.20 um 04:18 schrieb Mike McGrath:
If “Stream” is the base for the next RHEL8.x where are the updates until
2029 coming from, when CentOS Stream 8 will be shutdown at 2024?
—
Leon
I will totally agree with the following comments on the above blog article:
“Matt Phelps says (December 8, 2020 at 4:12 pm):
This is a breach of trust from the already published timeline of CentOS
8 where the EOL was May 2029. One year’s notice for such a massive change is unacceptable. Move this approach to CentOS 9.”
and:
“fahrradflucht says (December 8, 2020 at 5:37 pm):
This! People already started deploying CentOS 8 with the expectation of
10 years of updates.
– Even a migration to RHEL 8 would imply completely reprovisioning the systems which is a big ask for systems deployed in the field.”
You people at IBM/RedHat are betraying and crucifying your own users and community, right after we have started numerous CentOS 8 systems in production, after months or even years of planning, investing in know-how and testing.
This is really irritating.
If you do not recall this policy, not only you will cause huge problems to thousands of administrators out there; you will suffer their wrath.
Unless you recall this policy and provide CentOS 8 as promised until the end of its life-cycle, you are proving imposters by luring thousands to using a product which you planned to effectively abolish.
I still hope that you will not disappoint CentOS admins and users so badly and that you will continue to support CentOS 8 (and CentOS 7) in its current/expected form.
Nick
A petition has started, to request IBM/Redhat to continue CentOS 8 as initially announced/promised.
I’m most disappointed with the silence from Karanbir and friends. Obviously their Red Hat salary is more important to them than keeping CentOS the way it was. :-(
Yes, far be it from people to worry about putting food on their children’s table during a pandemic.
Your mistake, along with that of many, is thinking the Board had a choice in any of this. So what, exactly, do you expect Singh or others to say? What, if anything, could they say that would make you feel better about this?
John
“John R. Dennison” wrote:
Oh, please. Nobody suggested this has anything to do with the pandemic; nobody even mentioned the pandemic, except you.
“Red Hat salary more important”
This implies you expect them to put their jobs on the line to protect some set of ideals. Even if it were not for the pandemic it’s folly to expect people to commit career suicide over what’s a done deal.
John
I’m sure they will speak out once they are in position to do so. That’s obviously not now and nobody should blame them for it. They deserve better!
Simon
Am 12.12.20 um 04:11 schrieb Yves Bellefeuille:
While we are on pandemic, a complete different point here now.
( its already being said, but it occupies us still mentally )
What about the small businesses that in this times suffer very much, being forced to pay licenses will kill them … I have a client that moved from IBMCloud/RedHat to AWS/CentOS to survive this times.
(BTW: I suggest initially to use RHEL!) What do imagine who will be killed when they receive the message that they should plan some budgets for new licenses …
Am 12.12.20 um 10:52 schrieb Simon Matter:
+1 – some of them have personal blogs …
This boggles the mind.
Hi. Springdale Linux, RHEL clone already exists. Rocky Linux clone is in preparation, and CloudLinux plans to publish RHEL clone also. And notice that CentOS Linux 7 will be supported until EOL in 2024 and there will still be support for CentOS Linux 8 for next 12 months, enough to chose your exit strategy smartly and without emotions.
—
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers Serbia, Europe
StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant
Springdale does not at present have an EL8 release to the best of my knowledge.
John
Am 12.12.20 um 21:55 schrieb John R. Dennison:
I was also confused at the beginning taking a look at it but they have a current EL8.3 branch – a tested migration path look like this:
appears facebook is running CentOS stream and also helping developing
A small but important point of order on that statement, based on the article you link;
“an operating system they derive from CentOS Stream. “
So Stream is the starting point which Facebook then does “facebook things”
to and forms their own in-house distro. They’re not running Stream.
They only do not have DVD ISO, but they have “network” CD ISO for 8.1, and they have boot.iso for 8.3 for install over internet.
Ahh. Good to know. Thanks to both you and Leon Fauster for correcting me on this.
John
>>
Which brings further thoughts. I was creating replacements for CentOS 6
based systems, obviously beginning with CentOS 8.
CentOS 7 looks less clumsy than CentOS 8, but it only receives maintenance updates now. Still 4 years ahead look better than one year with CentOS 8.
My only concern ATM is whether RH can change its CentOS 7 maintenance plans as well, all of a sudden.
(if I change Linux distribution later to another RHEL clone, it most probably would mean complete re-install anyway)
“Choose now, Neo!”
—
Sincerely,
Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)
This is what bothers me, too, but in a slightly different way.
Something interesting happens when there’s change. People get involved in a different way, and it can actually be positive.
CentOS for me is an example of something that many people took for granted
(including myself). Now there’s change and the start of things like Rocky, I think a lot of people learn something new with a new distro, and feel like they can get involved, people learn again what it takes, there’s a new energy. Personally I hope CentOS, Rocky all thrive.
My main negative is the shortening of end of life, it’s caught me out. That’s a big no-no in this world as far as I’m concerned. It’s all been said already though.
Ian
The whole issue of “support longevity” raises an issue I’ve been pondering, is 10-year support a good thing from a security perspective? At work we use Ubuntu LTS which has only a five year support cycle (you can pay for an extra five years) but, even with that, issues have arisen. Although they do security and bug fix updates, the package versions remain basically the same. So, if a package is on version 1.2.3, it remains 1.2.3 with bug fixes and security patches for the life of the distribution. Does Red Hat/CentOS do the same thing?
The reason I ask is I ran into an issue where OpenVPN was updated in a later release to support a more robust security architecture which wasn’t available until I upgraded. A configuration change could have addressed a security weakness in the older version so that the issue wasn’t one of a security patch. However, the change required a lot of effort to implement.
Now I’m wondering about packages in general.
Yes. Nearly always. Exceptions are in release notes as “rebasing”.
This, in a nutshell, is why it is better for stability within a release, to back-port fixes. Yes, it takes a lot more effort by Red Hat to maintain software this way.
When you decide a package needs a significantly newer version, that’s when you start looking at new releases of the OS.
I’m also using CentOS for a while and I’m deploying a CentOS8 cluster for some months…. because it was supported until 2029! Bad idea. For me, using debian has 2 important drawbacks
– some of proprietary software we are using is certified RHEL and SLES. Deploying on CentOS is out-of-thebox. Deploying on debian (we have also debian servers) is often a nightmare and some functionalities still doesn’t work (and support reply “debian is not supported”). We have no alternative for these softwares.
– hardware support for servers rely also on some certifications and they are mainly for RHEL or SLES (or Unbutu but for laptops, not servers) and in case of trouble the support has yet answered “please use a certified os”. CentOS is considered as RHEL by the support. Not sure that with stream it will be the same.
Patrick
Le 14/12/2020 à 17:57, Lamar Owen a écrit :
I think that CentOS, being that close to RHEL, should have had a licensing scheme for personal use, small business use, just to make things ‘fair’.
It should be fine to use CentOS as a “Community Enterprise OS”, as a stepping stone, but once it starts taking off, like it did with some big enterprises, there should have been an obligation to switch to Redhat, and pay up.
CentOS/RHEL, pretty much being done/over, means that startups are confronted with a competitive problem, AND also, upcoming sys people/talent not having the opportunity to get into “that world” is a problem. I think it is detrimental to the further use of anything RHEL.
The only thing RHEL can ‘bank on’ in the near future is that there is nothing else around yet. (but problems like these never lasted long in the past)
‘Rocky Linux’ guy might actually be on to something (although I’d pick another distro name), if he can pull that off (which is not even that far fetched), he can expect 6/7 figure development checks from organizations that used the model as it is now, or used to be, organizations that use the OS at scale (think multiple 8 figure price tag machinery).
I don’t think their (IBM/RHEL) course is going to change though, redhat going “commercial” has been going on for a decade and a half or so, and it looks like initial investors have a desire cashing/selling out at this point.
CentOS is kind of equivalent to RHEL, as you mentioned, heck, I have RHEL support because of countless licenses where I work AND I can use the knowledge databases and support for ‘anything remotely’ work related. I even was explicitly told I can use it for anything at home if I wish.
I am not too worried though, there will be something new, it will just not be CentOS, nor RHEL, and that just happens every or two decade or so, that is just history repeating itself.
They have “network” CD ISO for 8.1 and boot.iso for 8.3.
If you have to deal with proprietary software, OEL is currently the only cost-free option you have (if an RHEL clone is wanted). The advantage with OEL is that most proprietary software supports OEL out-of-the-box, you don’t have to do
“naming” tricks to run software like SAP.
Switching to OEL is quite easy (https://github.com/oracle/CentOS2ol) and the same method could be used to switch to something else if better options are available.
Oh I know, there are already programs like that. For example, want to learn how to play with Kubernetes, sure, here get a free full trial licence for RHEL to do that (but you can only get one.). Use cases; I
think a lot of people using CentOS do it, because they can easily/free build a server/workstation pretty much the same as at work, the only difference being the background being blue instead of red.
Sure, redhat might help these “use cases” out, but that means you are accepting a gift from a company that has an interest in selling to your employer, and most employers will definitely not allow that and terminate those who do.
From what I understand, RHEL and CentOS go different ways so a lot of
“the community” will start looking for alternatives, and will find them. We’ll see how it goes.
(the order of magnitude in increase of email on these lists, might be an indication about the quality of that idea.)
I know you and other RHEL folks keep saying this about cashing out etc, but they could have kept stream and CentOS stable at the same time but chose not to. Ya know, if it walks like a duck and quacks as a duck…who knows maybe this goes down as one of the best decisions ever for RH but I think its going to hurt them in more ways then they ever thought about.
Not to mention the constant barrage of “You just want free Red Hat” and
“CentOS users are moochers” and “We deserve value from all those CentOS
users, so we’re going to turn them into beta testers for RHEL.” I have gotten these responses here and on twitter from CentOS and Red Hat employees.
So, sorry, but this line about this not being a money grab is an obvious crock of excrement.
The name comes from his CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh, who is no longer with us, in his memory.
I think you are exactly on target there with your thoughts. IBM looks after their investors and their customers, they never really cared about
“personal computing” (pun intended), nor small business computing, and evidently, as history shows, suck at it when they made an attempt or two.
Yup, a lot of “CentOS Users” are the ones running and building for RHEL
infrastructure, there’s a lot more in it for IBM to take over RHEL than there is to take over Ubuntu, mint or build something new. The thought more than likely is “an established market is already out there”.
I don’t think that IBM is in the business of “Hey let’s do something really nice, because we don’t really need/want the money”
Am Dienstag, den 15.12.2020, 12:06 -0500 schrieb Matthew Miller:
But with the move of CentOS/RedHat to restrict the previously promised support time for CentOS 8, they loose alot of trust in future statements. Trust must be earned and RedHat/CentOS/IBM has carelessly wasted that trust.
We will see, what happens in the future, but currently i cannot recommend without serious doubt to trust RedHat in the long run.
—
Peter Huebner
I didn’t know that fact, but hey that could be a pretty cool tribute.
Or the line that they “never promised 2029” and that it “was a mistake”. THey keep trying to make it out as if the lifetime of CentOS was separate from RHEL. Yet, this interview comes out where Rich Bowen says exactly that it is, like we all expected it to be.
As I’ve also said before, I have no special insight into how RH and the CentOS board came to this timeline, but I _am_ inclined to believe that the motivation is the one that they give: they want to focus attention and resources. Look at CloudLinux saying that they plan to invest a million dollars a year into doing their rebuild. It’s easy to _say_ “Red Hat could easily have done both”.
yup, I think you are right, they’ll pay attention and focus on resources
…
WOW!!!! a million a year, that is amazing, that will definitely get things going, with that kind of money you can hire 3 HS students and two college drop outs, that’s
how MS started too.
Please, yeah poor, poor Redhat, they are struggling these days, *cough*
they needed to do this in order to survive. I thought it didn’t have anything to do with cashing in. Really it’s there choice if the decide to run it into the ground or not, to many bean counters get involved and it all becomes about making money, nowhere close to the original ideals for the company when it was started.
It was in Greg’s announcement of Rocky Linux. Right up near the top if I recall correctly.
John
First, I will note that I think the idea of creating *a version of*
CentOS that is called “Stream”, with the intent that it leads RHEL by a bit, is a GREAT idea, for exactly the stated reasons!
There’s one problem I have with this asserted motivation. Stream is not being done as *a version of* CentOS. It is being done as *THE*
CentOS, which means you’re discontinuing point releases. As far as
“maintaining CentOS point releases to follow RHEL”- this is what is being discontinued. How much money, in developer time and other incidentals, does this cost RedHat per year? Of course this is a proprietary number. But let’s imagine that this number is $250k per year. Out of what was it, about $433M of profit (2019)? So it would cost RedHat 0.06% of profit to hire more developers to keep issuing CentOS point releases.
What does RedHat “buy” in return for spending 0.06% of its profit on maintaining point releases?
-Community trust and goodwill. Those members of the community that cannot afford RedHat licenses for whatever reason still know that the
#1 player in the Linux marketplace still has their back. Then when those folks move on to enterprises that can afford RH licensing (and in some cases demand it), will select RedHat because of this trust and goodwill. They will be highly likely to recommend other RedHat products- since it all “works together” and they’ll know RHEL (i.e. CentOS) well. Also note that this trust and goodwill means
“convenience”, even within enterprises that have a large budget with RedHat. If I have a project and I want to spin up 100 OS instances just for the heck of it, I can. I don’t need to ask anyone, I don’t need to reserve or download any entitlement key files. I don’t need to debug weird problems when entitlement key files don’t work.
-Control of part of the ecosystem. Those companies that build their products to run on RHEL (or in RHEL containers) are able to (and encouraged to) certify those products on RHEL because they are able to use CentOS.
But more to the point, what does RedHat LOSE by saving 0.06% of its profit? The damage to community trust and goodwill far exceeds the gains that would be realized if the status quo were kept in place. Yes, it’s true that many of the folks who used CentOS would never turn into paying customers. But due to this situation, you have thousands of system administrators who are actively looking to completely abandon the RedHat ecosystem altogether. When it comes time to recommend products… they aren’t going to recommend RHEL. They aren’t going to recommend JBoss, or Fuse, or 3Scale API management. It’s clear that RedHat can’t be trusted with some parts of its portfolio, so why should we trust ANY of its products?
If it is 100% factually correct that the ONLY motivation for killing point releases is the stated motivation, then it’s just a simple matter of finding a spare $250k (or whatever that cost is) from the almost-half-a-billion dollar corporate coin purse. The return on investment has been, and will continue to be, immeasurable… IF y’all do damage control ASAP.
–JK
So don’t trust them. Move to something else if you think something is better.
$250K is not even close. That is one employee, when you also take into account unemployment insurance, HR, medical insurance etc. now multiply that by 8. Now, outfit those 8 employees to work from home .. all over the world, different countries, different laws.
.. THEN buy 30 machines minimum (servers, not workstations) for building and testing, buy a service contract for those 30 machines, host the bandwidth required to sync out to 600 worldwide servers.
We need all the CI machines .. that is a bunch of blade servers for that. They need service contacts too.
In any event it doesn’t matter. The decision is made. If people don’t want to use CentOS Stream, then don’t. The decision is not changing.
We won’t.
Thanks for all your work in the past. Good luck to you.
And to Red Hat I have one more thing to say:
Buh bye!
###
$250K is not even close. That is one employee, when you also take into account unemployment insurance, HR, medical insurance etc. now multiply that by 8. Now, outfit those 8 employees to work from home .. all over the world, different countries, different laws.
Every package that ends up in a RHEL point release is in Stream at some point, right? While I can certainly believe that the cost for the entire CentOS effort is much more than $250K, dropping CentOS point releases just means not gathering the particular versions that ended up in the corresponding RHEL point release.
Even for someone outside of CentOS, it sounds as simple as constantly downloading everything that’s released in Stream (since apparently old rpm revisions won’t stay in the CentOS repo), then looking at which versions made it into the RHEL point release, and copying just those to a repo for update. Am I missing some complex step?
This is exactly what I was talking about. I didn’t ask, “how much does it cost to build CentOS”. More specifically I was speculating on the amount of additional effort that was specifically required to do CentOS point release support, over and above the standard CentOS
development (that RedHat would still be paying for). Having said that- it’s possible that RedHat has heavily modified the build path for CentOS, since now it’s upstream of RHEL instead of downstream; and if that’s the case it could be that the new build path makes it impossible to build point releases. Having said THAT- it should be relatively simple to tag specific versions of packages in CentOS once those packages are released in a RHEL point release, then do an ISO
build off of that. (I was guesstimating that it would take one FTE
worth of time to do such tagging or other work needed to build the point releases based on the work that had already been done on the Stream updates, that’s where I got the $250k from.)
It seems as if it ought to actually be less expensive to do things this way than it has traditionally been to do CentOS… since traditionally, the CentOS team has had to pull the SRPMS for RHEL, duplicate a bunch of effort that RedHat had done to build them in the first place, and reconcile differences. Now since CentOS is actually part of the real RHEL build process, the work to create CentOS is paid for by RHEL. Officially.
Maybe THAT is the problem. Since CentOS is now part of the official RHEL build pipeline, RedHat is unwilling to allow that work to be used to build the traditional CentOS point releases. They aren’t going to directly contribute work that is paid for by RHEL to do the free CentOS releases. In order to do the ‘clean room’ implementation of point releases they would have to essentially re-duplicate ALL of the work that has traditionally been required to build CentOS… and THAT’S where the requirement of 8 FTE developers and dozens of servers comes from. They would build RHEL point releases and then they would put forth the 8 FTE worth of effort to do a clean-room rebuild of those releases in the form of CentOS, as they always have done.
From an internal view, if I were a RedHat business manager, I could totally see a legitimate desire to not fund a free product with the resources used to build my paid flagship product.
Having realized all of the above- and I understand this is pure speculation on my part- from an external view, as a community member, it looks different. It seems like RedHat is saying, “WAAAH WAAAH YOU
CAN’T HAVE MY TOYS GIVE THEM BACK OR ELSE!!!!” Even if the above is true regarding internal RHEL management not wanting RHEL funding a free product, *there is NO practical difference* on the effects towards the community. It is still the case that by taking this course of action RedHat has branded itself as being a bad faith actor. It is still the case that it would only cost RedHat a trivial amount-
perhaps substantially less than the $250k I estimated- to continue to do CentOS point releases based off of RHEL. It is still the case that RedHat could earn back a huge chunk of the trust that it destroyed, by deciding to spend this trivial amount to continue the status quo of CentOS builds.
RedHat needs to keep the following in mind: there is still value in RHEL. Patent indemnification, contractually guaranteed SLA’s for defects for mission critical systems, and so forth. This is the whole idea of RedHat’s existence, isn’t it? To take all of these hundreds of free software packages and repackage them and sell the value that the legal and contractual guarantees offer. As a community we don’t want that for CentOS. We know it’s “not legally supported”. We know that, if it breaks, we get to fix it ourselves or keep all the broken pieces. What we do want is a system that is repeatable, stable, and known. CentOS point releases provide that. CentOS Stream doesn’t.
I’m genuinely curious about something, and this is mostly academic since it’s probably the subject of proprietary discussions within RedHat. Presumably, RedHat had a build pipeline for RHEL that worked well for them, by supplying alpha/beta releases of point releases to their customers and giving them time to “cook” before releasing those point releases into production. Why would RedHat invest millions more in buying the CentOS process just to have CentOS act as the beta?
Indeed.
Often, when you can’t find a reasonable answer to a question, it is because the premise of the question itself is wrong.
Why did they change the development process of RHEL ..
Because they want to do the development in the community. The current process of RHEL development is closed .. they want it to be open. It is that simple.
I think Stream is also very usable as a distro. I think it will be just as usable as CentOS Linux is now.
It is not a beta .. I keep saying that. Before a .0 release (the main, or first, main reelase) is a beta. Point releases do not really need betas .. certainly not open to anyone other than customers. Now CentOS
Stream is available all the time to everyone, customer or not. Once the full infrastructure is in place, everyone (not just RHEL customers) can provide feed back and bugs, do pull requests, etc.
All users can also interact with all interim versions of packages, not just the items that get released. You can also see what is coming at any time if you are a RHEL customer.
If you are building things for RHEL .. you can build against what will be the RHEL + 0.1 source code. You (as the developer) can also make that open to public / community. Developers can also do SIGs in CentOS
Stream.
I may be cynical, but I think this is a business decision.
By gaining control of CentOS, RedHat gained control of its biggest
(apparent) competitor. This action should increase the value of RedHat. A few years later, IBM buys RedHat for a staggering 34 BILLION
dollars. I would expect that before the purchase, there is an internal
“PowerPoint” slide discussing the elimination of CentOS Linux. Despite the commentary otherwise, I believe CentOS Stream is a type of “beta”
release. RedHat can release changes into CentOS Stream to make sure it is all good before the point release of RHEL to the paying customers.
Or maybe not.
FCS
That is exactly my thought. IBM is a very big company, ‘physically’ as well as capital wise and they do top notch, state of the art, research and
development, and they can pretty much solve any problem. The only problem that IBM always had a problem with dealing with is their competition.
(The numerous, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, engineers they employ, tremendously increases their overhead, hence everything IBM is expensive.
(I expect that to happen to their licensing too, for redhat in the future)
Johnny, let me say first of all thanks for these years of hard work.
Hi Lamar, glad to interact w/ you on the list. We both have been doing this for a long time.
I was not thrilled about this decision and it would not have been the one made if things were up to me alone. Obviously they are not. I did support the issue from the perspective of the CentOS Board. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions in life. Many times, one wishes for another option. I do think I chose the best option available.
It is very depressing to me that something I love (CentOS Linux) is going away and being replaced. I would wish for a different way. But I
know that this decision is final.
As always. I will do my absolute best to make any CentOS Project offering the best it can possibly be. I therefore will give my absolute all to CentOS Stream and do what I can to make it work for as many people as possible.
Also, Red Hat is working on lower cost (and sometimes even free)
scenarios for current CentOS users for thigns they may not have though of. People can contact (via email) CentOS-questions@redhat.com
This is not a list for sales leads .. it is a list to help CentOS users. Anyone can use it to see if they qualify for one of the upcoming ways to RHEL. I don’t personally know anything about that list. Other than it is one of the things the CentOS Board negotiated for before our vote.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Hi Johnny,
I don’t doubt your numbers, they sound perfectly reasonable to me.
On the other hand: How many of the employees will be laid off or reallocated now that CentOS point releases are no longer published? How many of the servers will be shut down, how many service contracts will be cancelled? What’s your estimate of the reduction in bandwidth that will be saved by replacing point releases by a stream of releases with more frequent updates?
Too bad.
I’ve just completed a migration of about 30 servers from CentOS 6 to CentOS 8, expecting to get another 9 years of lifetime out of that (substantial) work. Now I have one year left of that, in which I need to plan what to do. One option is to go with the flow and switch to Stream, but I must admit that it’s not my favourite one. Rocky, Lenix or maybe Springsdale would be the next best guesses. But given the fact that I migrated the whole setup process to Ansible it might be a good idea to jump off the cliff and switch to Debian or FreeBSD. As I said, I have one year left which I plan to use for evaluation of options.
Two of my big customers will definitely not have that range of options. One of them is a RHEL shop with a tendency to try Debian, and last week they strongly thought about leaving the RHEL space entirely. The FOSS team there had made substantial effort over the last year to get CentOS on the list of company-approved operating systems (currently that’s only RHEL and Debian), and now that work has gone down the drain completely. You can imagine how they feel now.
The other one is stuck with RHEL-based distributions (Oracle, you know) – but they consider switching to OEL with support as well. At least they’ll get rid of the hassle with the RHN that way, which can be a pain in the backside.
I doubt those two are the only ones. My guess is this decision will backfire big time. I would love to stand corrected in one year’s time, because I really like the RHEL way of doing things. Or rather, I liked it. Until last week. Still a great set of products, but the trustworthiness of Red Hat has taken a big hit for me, and for my customers as well.
Anyway, thank you and the rest of the CentOS team for all the great work you’ve done and are doing. It is appreciated, and it will not be forgotten.
Peter.
CentOS Linux 7 will be fully supported until the scheduled EOL in 2024
and the current employees working on CentOS Linux will continue to work with the CPE team on CentOS Stream and other projects.
Its great because it has RHEL inside (just joking in a storming weather) :-)
—
Leon
Yes, indeed. (Xenix V7 on a TRS-80 Model 16 in 1988…, I STILL use my vi skills from that time i my life!)
Yes, how true.
It’s usable, as Fedora is certainly usable – in its separate use cases. It’s not bug-for-bug copy of current RHEL, so it’s *not* as usable as CentOS Linux was.
Now please tell me whether Chris Wright was lying when saying the below to ZDNet:
“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. It’s purely a developer’s distro.”
It’s purely a developer’s distro. Shall I explain difference between a developer’s distro and the one suitable for production servers (a rhetoric question)?
Has Chris Wright ever recommended CentOS for any purpose other than development and testing?
How did you imagine you would look when you asked a CentOS maintainer if he understands the importance of the thing he’s been doing for 17 years?
Will a Red Hat CTO, in his right mind, ever recommend a free clone of RHEL for any purpose other than development and testing?
That’s completely unrelated to my statements.
Please do worry about your own look. Thanks.
Of course he wasn’t lying. The purpose of ANY CentOS release from a Red Hat perspective, is as a developer release. Red Hat has never produced CentOS to be used in production for any reason.
It is ALSO completely free to use however YOU want to use it. As is CentOS Stream. If it meets your requirements, you can use it. Stream is no different.
People who certify things, who certified CentOS Linux for things, are free to evaluate and do that with CentOS Stream as well.
Is it ever going to be like it was before .. no. If that is a deal breaker for you, OK. Then you can’t use CentOS any longer. Great, if you can’t use it, then use something else.
All I can do is what I can do .. All you can do is what you can do. What is absolutely not helpful is continued complaining. A decision was made. It is implemented. CentOS Stream is CentOS Stream.
If you never want to use CentOS again .. great, don’t use it. I can’t make people use CentOS if they don’t want to.
What I will do is what I have been doing for the last 17 years .. I will do the best job I can to make the things I can build for any version of CentOS Linux (or Stream) the best they can be. If people can use them, OK. If they can’t OK.
Johnny,
You have been involved in CentOS for a long time. Would you mind explaining the structure here. Do you work for Red hat full time on the CentOS team? How many people are on that Team that were working on CentOS? Is CentOS structured as a non-profit company with staff just working on development of this distribution or is this just a group of independent developers working on the same project? How many people are working on active development of on the Red hat team / CentOS
Organization (if any)?
Right… he’s not “lying”, he just has a different audience.
Red Hat has definitely never ever said in any official way that CentOS Linux is acceptable for production uses. And that’s not going to change with CentOS Stream.
You should see people’s heads spin around like a scene from a horror movie when I suggest that people actually do run Fedora operating systems in production!
Johnny can answer this too (and I’ll let him cover the specifics about his own employment) but since I’m here:
Like Fedora, there is no formal legal structure around CentOS as a project.
“A group of developers and stakeholders” is a reasonable description. Red Hat is the primary sponsor of both projects, and holds the trademarks and other intellectual property — and takes most legal responsibility and risk. Red Hat also funds engineering, hardware, and a community budget.
There is no dedicated CentOS team at Red Hat, just as there is no dedicated Fedora team. There are two highly-relevant teams, though. The first is Community Platform Engineering, which serves infrastructure and build tooling for both projects. Second is the Open Source Program Office, which has a team of community managers and leaders. (Rich Bowen and Marie Nordin fit in there.) Others are employeed other places — Ben Cotton, who serves as Program Manager for both Fedora and CentOS Stream — comes to us from the program management office.
There is no one at Red Hat whose individual job is “develop Fedora”. Instead, like non-RH community members, lots of different people across Red Hat engineering have “maintain my package in Fedora” as part of their job, or “work on the Fedora Workstation as a whole”. Those people are usually also responsible for something similar in RHEL.
This is true for RDO for OpenStack or OKD for OpenShift, too. And I’d have to check for sure but I assume it is also the case for AWX for Ansible.
So, CentOS Linux is something kind of an aberration, because RH was paying people in the CPE team to spend their time on package builds, even though they weren’t building those packages for RHEL. That’s the thing Red Hat wants to stop doing. With Stream, packages will be actually built by the engineers who are building them for RHEL. People working on CentOS Stream
_project_ engineering will be more like the way CPE works for Fedora: on infrastructure and services around that.
As I understand it, this was something like 2-3 full-time equivalent positions just doing repackaging and associated work. I don’t know the precise number. That might not seem like a lot, but if you’ve ever scrambled for req’s for a project, you know it’s a big deal. Red Hat’s RHEL
organization does not actually have a lot of extra fat to spare. But there is a lot of work that needs to be done to make the CentOS Stream infrastructure.
So, like I’ve said before, the given explanation of “we want to actually focus resources” makes total sense to me as an important driver. Instead of doing what is essentially duplicative work, people paid to work on CentOS
specifically can act as catalysts, and the hundreds of people in the RHEL
organization who previously didn’t look at CentOS at all are now CentOS
developers directly.
—
Matthew Miller
Fedora Project Leader
Am 18.12.20 um 19:14 schrieb Matthew Miller:
In the different threads here in the list – I noticed that everyone
(not all in quantity) has a different definition of production and development “classification”. For instance RH: Their devel license talks about not to use it for production. I am still unsure where the border for that are? Running a workstation and “producing” output that have value for me is a production system. As also a fly radar HA cluster running 24/7 is a production system. Anyway, lets see what Q1 2021 will bring …
OT: when will I learn to just shut up after arriving at my own decision? (rhetoric question)
It doesn’t matter whether RedHat said anything or not. We did use CentOS as “binary replica” of RedHat Enterprise (I for one for over decade and a half), and did have same level of stability as RedHat Enterprise customers had [almost?].Which confirmed the second word in the abbreviated name of the system (Community Enterprise OS).
But now there is nothing [in my book] to justify that “Enterprise” word in the name.
Indeed, that is why many of us who originally switched to Fedora (Hm, when free RedHat ceased to exist somewhere near RedHat 8, do people still remember these CD/DVD sets?). And shortly after, from Fedora to CentOS.
And no, “development” precursor of RedHat Enterprise which Fedora was is no match to “binary replica” of RedHat Enterprise. And it looks – for not too insightful person: myself – that now it will be CentOS a “development” precursor of RedHat Enterprise (taking place of Fedora, and potentially same production usability as Fedora has). And again, I will be happy for everyone who bravely keeps using CentOS (Stream) in production if my feelings are gravely wrong. But I myself “chickened out”. Servers: over 6 years ago (to FreeBSD, and there no surprises with FreeBSD; but apologies for annoying mentioning of the great UNIX successor on this list).
And once again, Thanks a lot for great work, CentOS team! We were enjoying excellent fruits of your work, I – for about decade and a half. And good luck to you in future, I know your work will be same great, it is just humble us who are unhappy about future arrangement.
Valeri
This is what makes me think this isn’t as bad as people made it out to be. (And yeah, I take full responsibility for being one of those
‘people’ LOL). For the community, there are two challenges. One is very easy to overcome and the other is an unknown. (Or perhaps it is a known, once we can get everyone to see from the same perspective.)
Suppose it is June of 2022 and I have been collecting and archiving all of the various versions of packages that are coming out for CentOS
Stream. Then, maybe RHEL 8.7 is finalized and hits the mirrors. I
can analyze the versions of packages that landed in RHEL 8.7. Then I
can grab those versions from my archive and tag them “8.7”. I could configure my repositories appropriately and build some ISO images. Of course, I couldn’t call that “CentOS 8.7” because RedHat has prohibited that. But still I could release ISO’s of “Enterprise Respin 8.7”. That is the easy problem to overcome.
But there’s still the question of long term support. Suppose it is
2027 and some major bug is found in OpenSSL. For RedHat customers, RedHat will build a package of OpenSSL for RHEL 8.10 that fixes the bug. I would guess that such an OpenSSL package would NOT be the same one that lands in whatever version of RHEL 9 drops in 2027, since the OpenSSL in RHEL 9 will be based on a later version of OpenSSL and have more features. Presumably that RHEL 8 version of OpenSSL would go through the CentOS Streams process. Theoretically I could pick up that version of the package and provide it as an update to “Enterprise Respin 8.10”.
Except… how could that RHEL8 version of OpenSSL go through the CentOS Streams process? Based on what we’ve been told, at that time,
“CentOS Streams” would really be “Whatever version of RHEL 9 drops in
2027 + 1”. Or maybe it’s even RHEL 10 by that point. So maybe long term updates won’t go through the CentOS Streams process.
So the question for the community is how to account for that second issue.
–JK
Right, as the plan exists right now, long term updates (after five years)
won’t go through CentOS Stream.
Every package in CentOS stream will be signed with CentOS keys, and CentOS is now trademark of Red Hat. Are you sure it would be legal to publish/distribute CentOS-signed packages under any other name?
CentOS and other clones were legaly “safe” because they distributed their own binaries, but could bot use any RHEL’s binaries…
into multiply over
Believe me, I don’t care a penny about what Red Hat has in its perspective.
Fact: CentOS is and was successfully used in a variety of production servers (where RH, of course, would prefer to see RHEL). CentOS was stable and reliable. This is why I, among other sysadmins, was using it. It was stable and conservative, that’s what I need.
Who’s complaining?
I am just displeased to see a corporation, which has no more use in CentOS, having decided to just kill it off.
As it was said many a time in the list, if the problem was in money, all RH would need to do was to ask. There would have been much response from both people and companies. No, RH just doesn’t need it. CentOS Stream better supports its business model. Just a business decision, nothing personal.
I am sorry to see the community being split and displeased, that’s all.
I will definitely use CentOS Stream, as development media (as I use Fedora), in case someone cares.
I appreciate both your efforts and and efforts of whoever else supported CentOS all these years. It was a great work.
Personally, I advised to whoever I could to buy something from RH to support the cause, and supported CentOS in other possible ways I could. These 17 years were interesting ones.
I think this pretty much concludes the subject. My apologies if I did hurt your senses. CentOS is dead, long live CentOS, we’re moving onward.
An audience from another reality, I assume.
Which makes me curious, why Chris Wright doesn’t say a word on the subject after the announce of CentOS imminent shutdown? I would admire to read his words of “now that we decided to shut down CentOS Linux…”
Linux
(sigh) CentOS was and still is used successfully on production servers all over the globe. Those are facts. Whatever Red Hat thinks or advises doesn’t change the facts. They would never recommended a *free* clone of RHEL for production use, even if it would be 100 times more stable.
I was using Fedora on production servers, so what?
Finally, I choose to use on production something that requires less attention on yearly basis. So Fedora moved on to development systems, and CentOS/other distributions with long support are now on production ones.
If people are happy with Fedora on production, that’s strange to me, but why I should object?
A good point. I would say that production server is the one used by users of a service – the server which is expected to be stable, reliable and predictable.
So yes, the workstation I use in my everyday tasks is a production system for me.
—
Sincerely,
Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)
At 13 December, 2020 Simon Avery wrote:
A few engineers from the OS team at fb gave a talk in brussels earlier this year. It explains what’s different from vanilla stream and what the facebook things that go into it are:
I work for Red Hat full time (since the end of 2013) and I am part of the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team. Almost everything CentOS
from inside Red Hat currently happens on this team. In the future, when RHEL development has full shifted to the new process, the RHEL engineers will be directly building CentOS Stream. Right now, the below mentioned CentOS Stream team does it.
CentOS Infrastructure, CentOS Linux (legacy .. CentOS 7 until EOL in
2024, CentOS 8 Linux until Dec 2021), CentOS Stream (8 and later on Stream 9), and CentOS CI are all done from this team.
I personally do CentOS Linux 7 builds (and signing / release/announce)
and I also do most of the CentOS 8 Linux builds and releases.
There is a team that does CentOS Stream. There are about 5 people on this team (including me). This team also helps with CentOS Linux 8 from time to time as well.
There is a team of people that do infrastructure for both Fedora and CentOS. This infrastructure team actually maintains all the CentOS
Builders and the mirrors, etc (all hardware, networks, switches, etc). There are several people on this team.
There is also a team that does CentOS CI, it also contains several people.
Obviously, there are Managers and also agile team leaders who supervise
/ help set and meet goals that do not actually do hands on work with machines, builds, etc.
We are not “sure” .. but SIG content is also signed with CentOS
certified keys. My hope is we can have a SIG to follow on Stream content at some point.
Whether we will be able to or not, 5 years of lifetime with a 2 year overlap with the next version of Stream is still enough time for the majority of users. It is certainly similar to non payed Ubuntu or Debian
(for example)
80 thoughts on - CentOS 8 Future
Speaking only for myself, I am ready to give up on CentOS (and Red Hat)
entirely. Fedora meets all my clients’ needs with none of the chaos.
I shall miss the stability of past CentOS releases, much as I did those of Scientific Linux.
–Doc Savage
Fairview Heights, IL
same here, I used CentOS because it is ‘that close’ to redhat, and that what I use at work/HPC, but easy to install etc in home environments while practically having the same thing. I guess I need to tell my employer I need the same thing now.
I definitely appreciate the vote of confidence in Fedora! You’re not alone in using Fedora in a lot of serious ways.
However, I really encourage everyone to give this a chance. This is
(post-Fedora) RHEL development opening up in a new way, and CentOS is central to it. That’s a good place to be!
Am 09.12.20 um 04:18 schrieb Mike McGrath:
If “Stream” is the base for the next RHEL8.x where are the updates until
2029 coming from, when CentOS Stream 8 will be shutdown at 2024?
—
Leon
I will totally agree with the following comments on the above blog article:
“Matt Phelps says (December 8, 2020 at 4:12 pm):
This is a breach of trust from the already published timeline of CentOS
8 where the EOL was May 2029. One year’s notice for such a massive change is unacceptable. Move this approach to CentOS 9.”
and:
“fahrradflucht says (December 8, 2020 at 5:37 pm):
This! People already started deploying CentOS 8 with the expectation of
10 years of updates.
– Even a migration to RHEL 8 would imply completely reprovisioning the systems which is a big ask for systems deployed in the field.”
You people at IBM/RedHat are betraying and crucifying your own users and community, right after we have started numerous CentOS 8 systems in production, after months or even years of planning, investing in know-how and testing.
This is really irritating.
If you do not recall this policy, not only you will cause huge problems to thousands of administrators out there; you will suffer their wrath.
Unless you recall this policy and provide CentOS 8 as promised until the end of its life-cycle, you are proving imposters by luring thousands to using a product which you planned to effectively abolish.
I still hope that you will not disappoint CentOS admins and users so badly and that you will continue to support CentOS 8 (and CentOS 7) in its current/expected form.
Nick
A petition has started, to request IBM/Redhat to continue CentOS 8 as initially announced/promised.
Those who agree, are urged to sign:
https://www.change.org/p/CentOS-governing-board-do-not-destroy-CentOS-by-using-it-as-a-rhel-upstream
Cheers, Nick
Am 09.12.20 um 20:28 schrieb Jon Pruente:
No, its exactly as I said:
https://lists.CentOS.org/pipermail/CentOS/2020-December/352340.html
https://CentOS.org/distro-faq/#q13-can-i-start-up-a-sig-that-will-maintain-CentOS-stream-8-after-rhel8-reaches-the-end-of-full-support
(full-support -> 2024).
—
Leon
I’m most disappointed with the silence from Karanbir and friends. Obviously their Red Hat salary is more important to them than keeping CentOS the way it was. :-(
Yes, far be it from people to worry about putting food on their children’s table during a pandemic.
Your mistake, along with that of many, is thinking the Board had a choice in any of this. So what, exactly, do you expect Singh or others to say? What, if anything, could they say that would make you feel better about this?
John
“John R. Dennison” wrote:
Oh, please. Nobody suggested this has anything to do with the pandemic; nobody even mentioned the pandemic, except you.
“Red Hat salary more important”
This implies you expect them to put their jobs on the line to protect some set of ideals. Even if it were not for the pandemic it’s folly to expect people to commit career suicide over what’s a done deal.
John
I’m sure they will speak out once they are in position to do so. That’s obviously not now and nobody should blame them for it. They deserve better!
Simon
Am 12.12.20 um 04:11 schrieb Yves Bellefeuille:
While we are on pandemic, a complete different point here now.
( its already being said, but it occupies us still mentally )
What about the small businesses that in this times suffer very much, being forced to pay licenses will kill them … I have a client that moved from IBMCloud/RedHat to AWS/CentOS to survive this times.
(BTW: I suggest initially to use RHEL!) What do imagine who will be killed when they receive the message that they should plan some budgets for new licenses …
Am 12.12.20 um 10:52 schrieb Simon Matter:
+1 – some of them have personal blogs …
This boggles the mind.
Hi. Springdale Linux, RHEL clone already exists. Rocky Linux clone is in preparation, and CloudLinux plans to publish RHEL clone also. And notice that CentOS Linux 7 will be supported until EOL in 2024 and there will still be support for CentOS Linux 8 for next 12 months, enough to chose your exit strategy smartly and without emotions.
—
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers Serbia, Europe
StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant
Springdale does not at present have an EL8 release to the best of my knowledge.
John
Am 12.12.20 um 21:55 schrieb John R. Dennison:
I was also confused at the beginning taking a look at it but they have a current EL8.3 branch – a tested migration path look like this:
curl -O
“https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/7/x86_64/os/RPM-GPG-KEY-puias”
rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY-puias
curl -O
“https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-release-8.3-0.42.el8.x86_64.rpm”
curl -O
“https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-appstream-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm”
curl -O
“https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-core-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm”
rpm -K springdale-* |grep “digests signatures OK”
rpm –nodeps -ev CentOS-linux-release-8.3-1.2011.el8.noarch CentOS-linux-repos-8-2.el8.noarch
yum –releasever 8 localinstall spring*
yum clean all
yum distrosync
reboot
hi,
appears facebook is running CentOS stream and also helping developing CentOS. not sure if the following article has already been seen:
<https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/CentOS-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux>https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/CentOS-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux
appears facebook is running CentOS stream and also helping developing
A small but important point of order on that statement, based on the article you link;
“an operating system they derive from CentOS Stream. “
So Stream is the starting point which Facebook then does “facebook things”
to and forms their own in-house distro. They’re not running Stream.
They only do not have DVD ISO, but they have “network” CD ISO for 8.1, and they have boot.iso for 8.3 for install over internet.
Ahh. Good to know. Thanks to both you and Leon Fauster for correcting me on this.
John
>>
Which brings further thoughts. I was creating replacements for CentOS 6
based systems, obviously beginning with CentOS 8.
CentOS 7 looks less clumsy than CentOS 8, but it only receives maintenance updates now. Still 4 years ahead look better than one year with CentOS 8.
My only concern ATM is whether RH can change its CentOS 7 maintenance plans as well, all of a sudden.
(if I change Linux distribution later to another RHEL clone, it most probably would mean complete re-install anyway)
“Choose now, Neo!”
—
Sincerely,
Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)
This is what bothers me, too, but in a slightly different way.
Something interesting happens when there’s change. People get involved in a different way, and it can actually be positive.
CentOS for me is an example of something that many people took for granted
(including myself). Now there’s change and the start of things like Rocky, I think a lot of people learn something new with a new distro, and feel like they can get involved, people learn again what it takes, there’s a new energy. Personally I hope CentOS, Rocky all thrive.
My main negative is the shortening of end of life, it’s caught me out. That’s a big no-no in this world as far as I’m concerned. It’s all been said already though.
Ian
The whole issue of “support longevity” raises an issue I’ve been pondering, is 10-year support a good thing from a security perspective? At work we use Ubuntu LTS which has only a five year support cycle (you can pay for an extra five years) but, even with that, issues have arisen. Although they do security and bug fix updates, the package versions remain basically the same. So, if a package is on version 1.2.3, it remains 1.2.3 with bug fixes and security patches for the life of the distribution. Does Red Hat/CentOS do the same thing?
The reason I ask is I ran into an issue where OpenVPN was updated in a later release to support a more robust security architecture which wasn’t available until I upgraded. A configuration change could have addressed a security weakness in the older version so that the issue wasn’t one of a security patch. However, the change required a lot of effort to implement.
Now I’m wondering about packages in general.
Yes. Nearly always. Exceptions are in release notes as “rebasing”.
This, in a nutshell, is why it is better for stability within a release, to back-port fixes. Yes, it takes a lot more effort by Red Hat to maintain software this way.
When you decide a package needs a significantly newer version, that’s when you start looking at new releases of the OS.
I’m also using CentOS for a while and I’m deploying a CentOS8 cluster for some months…. because it was supported until 2029! Bad idea. For me, using debian has 2 important drawbacks
– some of proprietary software we are using is certified RHEL and SLES. Deploying on CentOS is out-of-thebox. Deploying on debian (we have also debian servers) is often a nightmare and some functionalities still doesn’t work (and support reply “debian is not supported”). We have no alternative for these softwares.
– hardware support for servers rely also on some certifications and they are mainly for RHEL or SLES (or Unbutu but for laptops, not servers) and in case of trouble the support has yet answered “please use a certified os”. CentOS is considered as RHEL by the support. Not sure that with stream it will be the same.
Patrick
Le 14/12/2020 à 17:57, Lamar Owen a écrit :
I think that CentOS, being that close to RHEL, should have had a licensing scheme for personal use, small business use, just to make things ‘fair’.
It should be fine to use CentOS as a “Community Enterprise OS”, as a stepping stone, but once it starts taking off, like it did with some big enterprises, there should have been an obligation to switch to Redhat, and pay up.
CentOS/RHEL, pretty much being done/over, means that startups are confronted with a competitive problem, AND also, upcoming sys people/talent not having the opportunity to get into “that world” is a problem. I think it is detrimental to the further use of anything RHEL.
The only thing RHEL can ‘bank on’ in the near future is that there is nothing else around yet. (but problems like these never lasted long in the past)
‘Rocky Linux’ guy might actually be on to something (although I’d pick another distro name), if he can pull that off (which is not even that far fetched), he can expect 6/7 figure development checks from organizations that used the model as it is now, or used to be, organizations that use the OS at scale (think multiple 8 figure price tag machinery).
I don’t think their (IBM/RHEL) course is going to change though, redhat going “commercial” has been going on for a decade and a half or so, and it looks like initial investors have a desire cashing/selling out at this point.
CentOS is kind of equivalent to RHEL, as you mentioned, heck, I have RHEL support because of countless licenses where I work AND I can use the knowledge databases and support for ‘anything remotely’ work related. I even was explicitly told I can use it for anything at home if I wish.
I am not too worried though, there will be something new, it will just not be CentOS, nor RHEL, and that just happens every or two decade or so, that is just history repeating itself.
Ron
Springdale made by Princeton exists longer then CentOS:
https://puias.math.ias.edu/
They have “network” CD ISO for 8.1 and boot.iso for 8.3.
If you have to deal with proprietary software, OEL is currently the only cost-free option you have (if an RHEL clone is wanted). The advantage with OEL is that most proprietary software supports OEL out-of-the-box, you don’t have to do
“naming” tricks to run software like SAP.
Switching to OEL is quite easy (https://github.com/oracle/CentOS2ol) and the same method could be used to switch to something else if better options are available.
Kind regards Thomas
So, again, please stay tuned. Not for licensing schemes for CentOS, but for programs for these use cases for RHEL. See https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-CentOS-stream-updates#Q10
and please really do mail CentOS-questions@redhat.com with your use cases. This is answered by humans designing these programs, not by sales.
I don’t think there will be a course change either, but for different reasons. The motivation isn’t “cashing/selling out”. It’s… actually the stated motivation https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-CentOS-stream-updates#Q2
Oh I know, there are already programs like that. For example, want to learn how to play with Kubernetes, sure, here get a free full trial licence for RHEL to do that (but you can only get one.). Use cases; I
think a lot of people using CentOS do it, because they can easily/free build a server/workstation pretty much the same as at work, the only difference being the background being blue instead of red.
Sure, redhat might help these “use cases” out, but that means you are accepting a gift from a company that has an interest in selling to your employer, and most employers will definitely not allow that and terminate those who do.
From what I understand, RHEL and CentOS go different ways so a lot of
“the community” will start looking for alternatives, and will find them. We’ll see how it goes.
(the order of magnitude in increase of email on these lists, might be an indication about the quality of that idea.)
I know you and other RHEL folks keep saying this about cashing out etc, but they could have kept stream and CentOS stable at the same time but chose not to. Ya know, if it walks like a duck and quacks as a duck…who knows maybe this goes down as one of the best decisions ever for RH but I think its going to hurt them in more ways then they ever thought about.
Not to mention the constant barrage of “You just want free Red Hat” and
“CentOS users are moochers” and “We deserve value from all those CentOS
users, so we’re going to turn them into beta testers for RHEL.” I have gotten these responses here and on twitter from CentOS and Red Hat employees.
So, sorry, but this line about this not being a money grab is an obvious crock of excrement.
The name comes from his CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh, who is no longer with us, in his memory.
I think you are exactly on target there with your thoughts. IBM looks after their investors and their customers, they never really cared about
“personal computing” (pun intended), nor small business computing, and evidently, as history shows, suck at it when they made an attempt or two.
Yup, a lot of “CentOS Users” are the ones running and building for RHEL
infrastructure, there’s a lot more in it for IBM to take over RHEL than there is to take over Ubuntu, mint or build something new. The thought more than likely is “an established market is already out there”.
I don’t think that IBM is in the business of “Hey let’s do something really nice, because we don’t really need/want the money”
Am Dienstag, den 15.12.2020, 12:06 -0500 schrieb Matthew Miller:
But with the move of CentOS/RedHat to restrict the previously promised support time for CentOS 8, they loose alot of trust in future statements. Trust must be earned and RedHat/CentOS/IBM has carelessly wasted that trust.
We will see, what happens in the future, but currently i cannot recommend without serious doubt to trust RedHat in the long run.
—
Peter Huebner
I didn’t know that fact, but hey that could be a pretty cool tribute.
Or the line that they “never promised 2029” and that it “was a mistake”. THey keep trying to make it out as if the lifetime of CentOS was separate from RHEL. Yet, this interview comes out where Rich Bowen says exactly that it is, like we all expected it to be.
project lists as EOL (End Of Life) dates are, and always have been, dependent on Red Hat. That is, we can say that CentOS Linux 7 will be EOL
on a particular date, but if the dates around RHEL 7 shift, hypothetically speaking, then so will those around CentOS Linux 7. That’s what happened with CentOS Linux 8. This decision was made by Red Hat and the CentOS Board. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Red_Hat_to_move_focus_away_from_CentOS_in_favour_of_Stream%3B_CentOS_team_discuss_implications_with_Wikinews
As I’ve also said before, I have no special insight into how RH and the CentOS board came to this timeline, but I _am_ inclined to believe that the motivation is the one that they give: they want to focus attention and resources. Look at CloudLinux saying that they plan to invest a million dollars a year into doing their rebuild. It’s easy to _say_ “Red Hat could easily have done both”.
yup, I think you are right, they’ll pay attention and focus on resources
…
WOW!!!! a million a year, that is amazing, that will definitely get things going, with that kind of money you can hire 3 HS students and two college drop outs, that’s
how MS started too.
Please, yeah poor, poor Redhat, they are struggling these days, *cough*
they needed to do this in order to survive. I thought it didn’t have anything to do with cashing in. Really it’s there choice if the decide to run it into the ground or not, to many bean counters get involved and it all becomes about making money, nowhere close to the original ideals for the company when it was started.
It was in Greg’s announcement of Rocky Linux. Right up near the top if I recall correctly.
John
First, I will note that I think the idea of creating *a version of*
CentOS that is called “Stream”, with the intent that it leads RHEL by a bit, is a GREAT idea, for exactly the stated reasons!
There’s one problem I have with this asserted motivation. Stream is not being done as *a version of* CentOS. It is being done as *THE*
CentOS, which means you’re discontinuing point releases. As far as
“maintaining CentOS point releases to follow RHEL”- this is what is being discontinued. How much money, in developer time and other incidentals, does this cost RedHat per year? Of course this is a proprietary number. But let’s imagine that this number is $250k per year. Out of what was it, about $433M of profit (2019)? So it would cost RedHat 0.06% of profit to hire more developers to keep issuing CentOS point releases.
What does RedHat “buy” in return for spending 0.06% of its profit on maintaining point releases?
-Community trust and goodwill. Those members of the community that cannot afford RedHat licenses for whatever reason still know that the
#1 player in the Linux marketplace still has their back. Then when those folks move on to enterprises that can afford RH licensing (and in some cases demand it), will select RedHat because of this trust and goodwill. They will be highly likely to recommend other RedHat products- since it all “works together” and they’ll know RHEL (i.e. CentOS) well. Also note that this trust and goodwill means
“convenience”, even within enterprises that have a large budget with RedHat. If I have a project and I want to spin up 100 OS instances just for the heck of it, I can. I don’t need to ask anyone, I don’t need to reserve or download any entitlement key files. I don’t need to debug weird problems when entitlement key files don’t work.
-Control of part of the ecosystem. Those companies that build their products to run on RHEL (or in RHEL containers) are able to (and encouraged to) certify those products on RHEL because they are able to use CentOS.
But more to the point, what does RedHat LOSE by saving 0.06% of its profit? The damage to community trust and goodwill far exceeds the gains that would be realized if the status quo were kept in place. Yes, it’s true that many of the folks who used CentOS would never turn into paying customers. But due to this situation, you have thousands of system administrators who are actively looking to completely abandon the RedHat ecosystem altogether. When it comes time to recommend products… they aren’t going to recommend RHEL. They aren’t going to recommend JBoss, or Fuse, or 3Scale API management. It’s clear that RedHat can’t be trusted with some parts of its portfolio, so why should we trust ANY of its products?
If it is 100% factually correct that the ONLY motivation for killing point releases is the stated motivation, then it’s just a simple matter of finding a spare $250k (or whatever that cost is) from the almost-half-a-billion dollar corporate coin purse. The return on investment has been, and will continue to be, immeasurable… IF y’all do damage control ASAP.
–JK
So don’t trust them. Move to something else if you think something is better.
$250K is not even close. That is one employee, when you also take into account unemployment insurance, HR, medical insurance etc. now multiply that by 8. Now, outfit those 8 employees to work from home .. all over the world, different countries, different laws.
.. THEN buy 30 machines minimum (servers, not workstations) for building and testing, buy a service contract for those 30 machines, host the bandwidth required to sync out to 600 worldwide servers.
We need all the CI machines .. that is a bunch of blade servers for that. They need service contacts too.
In any event it doesn’t matter. The decision is made. If people don’t want to use CentOS Stream, then don’t. The decision is not changing.
We won’t.
Thanks for all your work in the past. Good luck to you.
And to Red Hat I have one more thing to say:
Buh bye!
###
$250K is not even close. That is one employee, when you also take into account unemployment insurance, HR, medical insurance etc. now multiply that by 8. Now, outfit those 8 employees to work from home .. all over the world, different countries, different laws.
Every package that ends up in a RHEL point release is in Stream at some point, right? While I can certainly believe that the cost for the entire CentOS effort is much more than $250K, dropping CentOS point releases just means not gathering the particular versions that ended up in the corresponding RHEL point release.
Even for someone outside of CentOS, it sounds as simple as constantly downloading everything that’s released in Stream (since apparently old rpm revisions won’t stay in the CentOS repo), then looking at which versions made it into the RHEL point release, and copying just those to a repo for update. Am I missing some complex step?
This is exactly what I was talking about. I didn’t ask, “how much does it cost to build CentOS”. More specifically I was speculating on the amount of additional effort that was specifically required to do CentOS point release support, over and above the standard CentOS
development (that RedHat would still be paying for). Having said that- it’s possible that RedHat has heavily modified the build path for CentOS, since now it’s upstream of RHEL instead of downstream; and if that’s the case it could be that the new build path makes it impossible to build point releases. Having said THAT- it should be relatively simple to tag specific versions of packages in CentOS once those packages are released in a RHEL point release, then do an ISO
build off of that. (I was guesstimating that it would take one FTE
worth of time to do such tagging or other work needed to build the point releases based on the work that had already been done on the Stream updates, that’s where I got the $250k from.)
It seems as if it ought to actually be less expensive to do things this way than it has traditionally been to do CentOS… since traditionally, the CentOS team has had to pull the SRPMS for RHEL, duplicate a bunch of effort that RedHat had done to build them in the first place, and reconcile differences. Now since CentOS is actually part of the real RHEL build process, the work to create CentOS is paid for by RHEL. Officially.
Maybe THAT is the problem. Since CentOS is now part of the official RHEL build pipeline, RedHat is unwilling to allow that work to be used to build the traditional CentOS point releases. They aren’t going to directly contribute work that is paid for by RHEL to do the free CentOS releases. In order to do the ‘clean room’ implementation of point releases they would have to essentially re-duplicate ALL of the work that has traditionally been required to build CentOS… and THAT’S where the requirement of 8 FTE developers and dozens of servers comes from. They would build RHEL point releases and then they would put forth the 8 FTE worth of effort to do a clean-room rebuild of those releases in the form of CentOS, as they always have done.
From an internal view, if I were a RedHat business manager, I could totally see a legitimate desire to not fund a free product with the resources used to build my paid flagship product.
Having realized all of the above- and I understand this is pure speculation on my part- from an external view, as a community member, it looks different. It seems like RedHat is saying, “WAAAH WAAAH YOU
CAN’T HAVE MY TOYS GIVE THEM BACK OR ELSE!!!!” Even if the above is true regarding internal RHEL management not wanting RHEL funding a free product, *there is NO practical difference* on the effects towards the community. It is still the case that by taking this course of action RedHat has branded itself as being a bad faith actor. It is still the case that it would only cost RedHat a trivial amount-
perhaps substantially less than the $250k I estimated- to continue to do CentOS point releases based off of RHEL. It is still the case that RedHat could earn back a huge chunk of the trust that it destroyed, by deciding to spend this trivial amount to continue the status quo of CentOS builds.
RedHat needs to keep the following in mind: there is still value in RHEL. Patent indemnification, contractually guaranteed SLA’s for defects for mission critical systems, and so forth. This is the whole idea of RedHat’s existence, isn’t it? To take all of these hundreds of free software packages and repackage them and sell the value that the legal and contractual guarantees offer. As a community we don’t want that for CentOS. We know it’s “not legally supported”. We know that, if it breaks, we get to fix it ourselves or keep all the broken pieces. What we do want is a system that is repeatable, stable, and known. CentOS point releases provide that. CentOS Stream doesn’t.
I’m genuinely curious about something, and this is mostly academic since it’s probably the subject of proprietary discussions within RedHat. Presumably, RedHat had a build pipeline for RHEL that worked well for them, by supplying alpha/beta releases of point releases to their customers and giving them time to “cook” before releasing those point releases into production. Why would RedHat invest millions more in buying the CentOS process just to have CentOS act as the beta?
Indeed.
Often, when you can’t find a reasonable answer to a question, it is because the premise of the question itself is wrong.
Why did they change the development process of RHEL ..
Because they want to do the development in the community. The current process of RHEL development is closed .. they want it to be open. It is that simple.
I think Stream is also very usable as a distro. I think it will be just as usable as CentOS Linux is now.
It is not a beta .. I keep saying that. Before a .0 release (the main, or first, main reelase) is a beta. Point releases do not really need betas .. certainly not open to anyone other than customers. Now CentOS
Stream is available all the time to everyone, customer or not. Once the full infrastructure is in place, everyone (not just RHEL customers) can provide feed back and bugs, do pull requests, etc.
All users can also interact with all interim versions of packages, not just the items that get released. You can also see what is coming at any time if you are a RHEL customer.
If you are building things for RHEL .. you can build against what will be the RHEL + 0.1 source code. You (as the developer) can also make that open to public / community. Developers can also do SIGs in CentOS
Stream.
I may be cynical, but I think this is a business decision.
By gaining control of CentOS, RedHat gained control of its biggest
(apparent) competitor. This action should increase the value of RedHat. A few years later, IBM buys RedHat for a staggering 34 BILLION
dollars. I would expect that before the purchase, there is an internal
“PowerPoint” slide discussing the elimination of CentOS Linux. Despite the commentary otherwise, I believe CentOS Stream is a type of “beta”
release. RedHat can release changes into CentOS Stream to make sure it is all good before the point release of RHEL to the paying customers.
Or maybe not.
FCS
That is exactly my thought. IBM is a very big company, ‘physically’ as well as capital wise and they do top notch, state of the art, research and
development, and they can pretty much solve any problem. The only problem that IBM always had a problem with dealing with is their competition.
(The numerous, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, engineers they employ, tremendously increases their overhead, hence everything IBM is expensive.
(I expect that to happen to their licensing too, for redhat in the future)
Johnny, let me say first of all thanks for these years of hard work.
Hi Lamar, glad to interact w/ you on the list. We both have been doing this for a long time.
I was not thrilled about this decision and it would not have been the one made if things were up to me alone. Obviously they are not. I did support the issue from the perspective of the CentOS Board. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions in life. Many times, one wishes for another option. I do think I chose the best option available.
It is very depressing to me that something I love (CentOS Linux) is going away and being replaced. I would wish for a different way. But I
know that this decision is final.
As always. I will do my absolute best to make any CentOS Project offering the best it can possibly be. I therefore will give my absolute all to CentOS Stream and do what I can to make it work for as many people as possible.
Also, Red Hat is working on lower cost (and sometimes even free)
scenarios for current CentOS users for thigns they may not have though of. People can contact (via email) CentOS-questions@redhat.com
This is not a list for sales leads .. it is a list to help CentOS users. Anyone can use it to see if they qualify for one of the upcoming ways to RHEL. I don’t personally know anything about that list. Other than it is one of the things the CentOS Board negotiated for before our vote.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Hi Johnny,
I don’t doubt your numbers, they sound perfectly reasonable to me.
On the other hand: How many of the employees will be laid off or reallocated now that CentOS point releases are no longer published? How many of the servers will be shut down, how many service contracts will be cancelled? What’s your estimate of the reduction in bandwidth that will be saved by replacing point releases by a stream of releases with more frequent updates?
Too bad.
I’ve just completed a migration of about 30 servers from CentOS 6 to CentOS 8, expecting to get another 9 years of lifetime out of that (substantial) work. Now I have one year left of that, in which I need to plan what to do. One option is to go with the flow and switch to Stream, but I must admit that it’s not my favourite one. Rocky, Lenix or maybe Springsdale would be the next best guesses. But given the fact that I migrated the whole setup process to Ansible it might be a good idea to jump off the cliff and switch to Debian or FreeBSD. As I said, I have one year left which I plan to use for evaluation of options.
Two of my big customers will definitely not have that range of options. One of them is a RHEL shop with a tendency to try Debian, and last week they strongly thought about leaving the RHEL space entirely. The FOSS team there had made substantial effort over the last year to get CentOS on the list of company-approved operating systems (currently that’s only RHEL and Debian), and now that work has gone down the drain completely. You can imagine how they feel now.
The other one is stuck with RHEL-based distributions (Oracle, you know) – but they consider switching to OEL with support as well. At least they’ll get rid of the hassle with the RHN that way, which can be a pain in the backside.
I doubt those two are the only ones. My guess is this decision will backfire big time. I would love to stand corrected in one year’s time, because I really like the RHEL way of doing things. Or rather, I liked it. Until last week. Still a great set of products, but the trustworthiness of Red Hat has taken a big hit for me, and for my customers as well.
Anyway, thank you and the rest of the CentOS team for all the great work you’ve done and are doing. It is appreciated, and it will not be forgotten.
Peter.
CentOS Linux 7 will be fully supported until the scheduled EOL in 2024
and the current employees working on CentOS Linux will continue to work with the CPE team on CentOS Stream and other projects.
Le 15/12/2020 à 10:09, Thomas Bendler a écrit :
+1 on that.
Oracle may be bad, but Oracle Linux is great.
—
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Am 17.12.20 um 17:38 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:
Its great because it has RHEL inside (just joking in a storming weather) :-)
—
Leon
Yes, indeed. (Xenix V7 on a TRS-80 Model 16 in 1988…, I STILL use my vi skills from that time i my life!)
Yes, how true.
It’s usable, as Fedora is certainly usable – in its separate use cases. It’s not bug-for-bug copy of current RHEL, so it’s *not* as usable as CentOS Linux was.
Now please tell me whether Chris Wright was lying when saying the below to ZDNet:
“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. It’s purely a developer’s distro.”
It’s purely a developer’s distro. Shall I explain difference between a developer’s distro and the one suitable for production servers (a rhetoric question)?
Has Chris Wright ever recommended CentOS for any purpose other than development and testing?
How did you imagine you would look when you asked a CentOS maintainer if he understands the importance of the thing he’s been doing for 17 years?
Will a Red Hat CTO, in his right mind, ever recommend a free clone of RHEL for any purpose other than development and testing?
That’s completely unrelated to my statements.
Please do worry about your own look. Thanks.
Of course he wasn’t lying. The purpose of ANY CentOS release from a Red Hat perspective, is as a developer release. Red Hat has never produced CentOS to be used in production for any reason.
It is ALSO completely free to use however YOU want to use it. As is CentOS Stream. If it meets your requirements, you can use it. Stream is no different.
People who certify things, who certified CentOS Linux for things, are free to evaluate and do that with CentOS Stream as well.
Is it ever going to be like it was before .. no. If that is a deal breaker for you, OK. Then you can’t use CentOS any longer. Great, if you can’t use it, then use something else.
All I can do is what I can do .. All you can do is what you can do. What is absolutely not helpful is continued complaining. A decision was made. It is implemented. CentOS Stream is CentOS Stream.
If you never want to use CentOS again .. great, don’t use it. I can’t make people use CentOS if they don’t want to.
What I will do is what I have been doing for the last 17 years .. I will do the best job I can to make the things I can build for any version of CentOS Linux (or Stream) the best they can be. If people can use them, OK. If they can’t OK.
Johnny,
You have been involved in CentOS for a long time. Would you mind explaining the structure here. Do you work for Red hat full time on the CentOS team? How many people are on that Team that were working on CentOS? Is CentOS structured as a non-profit company with staff just working on development of this distribution or is this just a group of independent developers working on the same project? How many people are working on active development of on the Red hat team / CentOS
Organization (if any)?
Thanks for your time.
Chris
—
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1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701
Office: 715-831-1682
Mobile: 715-563-3112
Fax: 715-831-6075
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Right… he’s not “lying”, he just has a different audience.
Red Hat has definitely never ever said in any official way that CentOS Linux is acceptable for production uses. And that’s not going to change with CentOS Stream.
You should see people’s heads spin around like a scene from a horror movie when I suggest that people actually do run Fedora operating systems in production!
Johnny can answer this too (and I’ll let him cover the specifics about his own employment) but since I’m here:
Like Fedora, there is no formal legal structure around CentOS as a project.
“A group of developers and stakeholders” is a reasonable description. Red Hat is the primary sponsor of both projects, and holds the trademarks and other intellectual property — and takes most legal responsibility and risk. Red Hat also funds engineering, hardware, and a community budget.
There is no dedicated CentOS team at Red Hat, just as there is no dedicated Fedora team. There are two highly-relevant teams, though. The first is Community Platform Engineering, which serves infrastructure and build tooling for both projects. Second is the Open Source Program Office, which has a team of community managers and leaders. (Rich Bowen and Marie Nordin fit in there.) Others are employeed other places — Ben Cotton, who serves as Program Manager for both Fedora and CentOS Stream — comes to us from the program management office.
There is no one at Red Hat whose individual job is “develop Fedora”. Instead, like non-RH community members, lots of different people across Red Hat engineering have “maintain my package in Fedora” as part of their job, or “work on the Fedora Workstation as a whole”. Those people are usually also responsible for something similar in RHEL.
This is true for RDO for OpenStack or OKD for OpenShift, too. And I’d have to check for sure but I assume it is also the case for AWX for Ansible.
So, CentOS Linux is something kind of an aberration, because RH was paying people in the CPE team to spend their time on package builds, even though they weren’t building those packages for RHEL. That’s the thing Red Hat wants to stop doing. With Stream, packages will be actually built by the engineers who are building them for RHEL. People working on CentOS Stream
_project_ engineering will be more like the way CPE works for Fedora: on infrastructure and services around that.
As I understand it, this was something like 2-3 full-time equivalent positions just doing repackaging and associated work. I don’t know the precise number. That might not seem like a lot, but if you’ve ever scrambled for req’s for a project, you know it’s a big deal. Red Hat’s RHEL
organization does not actually have a lot of extra fat to spare. But there is a lot of work that needs to be done to make the CentOS Stream infrastructure.
So, like I’ve said before, the given explanation of “we want to actually focus resources” makes total sense to me as an important driver. Instead of doing what is essentially duplicative work, people paid to work on CentOS
specifically can act as catalysts, and the hundreds of people in the RHEL
organization who previously didn’t look at CentOS at all are now CentOS
developers directly.
—
Matthew Miller
Fedora Project Leader
Am 18.12.20 um 19:14 schrieb Matthew Miller:
In the different threads here in the list – I noticed that everyone
(not all in quantity) has a different definition of production and development “classification”. For instance RH: Their devel license talks about not to use it for production. I am still unsure where the border for that are? Running a workstation and “producing” output that have value for me is a production system. As also a fly radar HA cluster running 24/7 is a production system. Anyway, lets see what Q1 2021 will bring …
OT: when will I learn to just shut up after arriving at my own decision? (rhetoric question)
It doesn’t matter whether RedHat said anything or not. We did use CentOS as “binary replica” of RedHat Enterprise (I for one for over decade and a half), and did have same level of stability as RedHat Enterprise customers had [almost?].Which confirmed the second word in the abbreviated name of the system (Community Enterprise OS).
But now there is nothing [in my book] to justify that “Enterprise” word in the name.
Indeed, that is why many of us who originally switched to Fedora (Hm, when free RedHat ceased to exist somewhere near RedHat 8, do people still remember these CD/DVD sets?). And shortly after, from Fedora to CentOS.
And no, “development” precursor of RedHat Enterprise which Fedora was is no match to “binary replica” of RedHat Enterprise. And it looks – for not too insightful person: myself – that now it will be CentOS a “development” precursor of RedHat Enterprise (taking place of Fedora, and potentially same production usability as Fedora has). And again, I will be happy for everyone who bravely keeps using CentOS (Stream) in production if my feelings are gravely wrong. But I myself “chickened out”. Servers: over 6 years ago (to FreeBSD, and there no surprises with FreeBSD; but apologies for annoying mentioning of the great UNIX successor on this list).
And once again, Thanks a lot for great work, CentOS team! We were enjoying excellent fruits of your work, I – for about decade and a half. And good luck to you in future, I know your work will be same great, it is just humble us who are unhappy about future arrangement.
Valeri
This is what makes me think this isn’t as bad as people made it out to be. (And yeah, I take full responsibility for being one of those
‘people’ LOL). For the community, there are two challenges. One is very easy to overcome and the other is an unknown. (Or perhaps it is a known, once we can get everyone to see from the same perspective.)
Suppose it is June of 2022 and I have been collecting and archiving all of the various versions of packages that are coming out for CentOS
Stream. Then, maybe RHEL 8.7 is finalized and hits the mirrors. I
can analyze the versions of packages that landed in RHEL 8.7. Then I
can grab those versions from my archive and tag them “8.7”. I could configure my repositories appropriately and build some ISO images. Of course, I couldn’t call that “CentOS 8.7” because RedHat has prohibited that. But still I could release ISO’s of “Enterprise Respin 8.7”. That is the easy problem to overcome.
But there’s still the question of long term support. Suppose it is
2027 and some major bug is found in OpenSSL. For RedHat customers, RedHat will build a package of OpenSSL for RHEL 8.10 that fixes the bug. I would guess that such an OpenSSL package would NOT be the same one that lands in whatever version of RHEL 9 drops in 2027, since the OpenSSL in RHEL 9 will be based on a later version of OpenSSL and have more features. Presumably that RHEL 8 version of OpenSSL would go through the CentOS Streams process. Theoretically I could pick up that version of the package and provide it as an update to “Enterprise Respin 8.10”.
Except… how could that RHEL8 version of OpenSSL go through the CentOS Streams process? Based on what we’ve been told, at that time,
“CentOS Streams” would really be “Whatever version of RHEL 9 drops in
2027 + 1”. Or maybe it’s even RHEL 10 by that point. So maybe long term updates won’t go through the CentOS Streams process.
So the question for the community is how to account for that second issue.
–JK
Right, as the plan exists right now, long term updates (after five years)
won’t go through CentOS Stream.
Every package in CentOS stream will be signed with CentOS keys, and CentOS is now trademark of Red Hat. Are you sure it would be legal to publish/distribute CentOS-signed packages under any other name?
CentOS and other clones were legaly “safe” because they distributed their own binaries, but could bot use any RHEL’s binaries…
into multiply over
Believe me, I don’t care a penny about what Red Hat has in its perspective.
Fact: CentOS is and was successfully used in a variety of production servers (where RH, of course, would prefer to see RHEL). CentOS was stable and reliable. This is why I, among other sysadmins, was using it. It was stable and conservative, that’s what I need.
Who’s complaining?
I am just displeased to see a corporation, which has no more use in CentOS, having decided to just kill it off.
As it was said many a time in the list, if the problem was in money, all RH would need to do was to ask. There would have been much response from both people and companies. No, RH just doesn’t need it. CentOS Stream better supports its business model. Just a business decision, nothing personal.
I am sorry to see the community being split and displeased, that’s all.
I will definitely use CentOS Stream, as development media (as I use Fedora), in case someone cares.
I appreciate both your efforts and and efforts of whoever else supported CentOS all these years. It was a great work.
Personally, I advised to whoever I could to buy something from RH to support the cause, and supported CentOS in other possible ways I could. These 17 years were interesting ones.
I think this pretty much concludes the subject. My apologies if I did hurt your senses. CentOS is dead, long live CentOS, we’re moving onward.
An audience from another reality, I assume.
Which makes me curious, why Chris Wright doesn’t say a word on the subject after the announce of CentOS imminent shutdown? I would admire to read his words of “now that we decided to shut down CentOS Linux…”
Linux
(sigh) CentOS was and still is used successfully on production servers all over the globe. Those are facts. Whatever Red Hat thinks or advises doesn’t change the facts. They would never recommended a *free* clone of RHEL for production use, even if it would be 100 times more stable.
I was using Fedora on production servers, so what?
Finally, I choose to use on production something that requires less attention on yearly basis. So Fedora moved on to development systems, and CentOS/other distributions with long support are now on production ones.
If people are happy with Fedora on production, that’s strange to me, but why I should object?
A good point. I would say that production server is the one used by users of a service – the server which is expected to be stable, reliable and predictable.
So yes, the workstation I use in my everyday tasks is a production system for me.
—
Sincerely,
Konstantin Boyandin system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. – IPHost Network Monitor)
At 13 December, 2020 Simon Avery wrote:
A few engineers from the OS team at fb gave a talk in brussels earlier this year. It explains what’s different from vanilla stream and what the facebook things that go into it are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
Matthew’s post is spot on.
I work for Red Hat full time (since the end of 2013) and I am part of the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team. Almost everything CentOS
from inside Red Hat currently happens on this team. In the future, when RHEL development has full shifted to the new process, the RHEL engineers will be directly building CentOS Stream. Right now, the below mentioned CentOS Stream team does it.
CentOS Infrastructure, CentOS Linux (legacy .. CentOS 7 until EOL in
2024, CentOS 8 Linux until Dec 2021), CentOS Stream (8 and later on Stream 9), and CentOS CI are all done from this team.
I personally do CentOS Linux 7 builds (and signing / release/announce)
and I also do most of the CentOS 8 Linux builds and releases.
There is a team that does CentOS Stream. There are about 5 people on this team (including me). This team also helps with CentOS Linux 8 from time to time as well.
There is a team of people that do infrastructure for both Fedora and CentOS. This infrastructure team actually maintains all the CentOS
Builders and the mirrors, etc (all hardware, networks, switches, etc). There are several people on this team.
There is also a team that does CentOS CI, it also contains several people.
Obviously, there are Managers and also agile team leaders who supervise
/ help set and meet goals that do not actually do hands on work with machines, builds, etc.
We are not “sure” .. but SIG content is also signed with CentOS
certified keys. My hope is we can have a SIG to follow on Stream content at some point.
Whether we will be able to or not, 5 years of lifetime with a 2 year overlap with the next version of Stream is still enough time for the majority of users. It is certainly similar to non payed Ubuntu or Debian
(for example)