CentOS 8 Stream: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

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Hello All-

After reading and digesting a ton of community chatter about the recent CentOS announcement I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of good about this, but there are also a lot of concerns that are being ignored. And nobody so far has stared directly into the eyes of the elephant in the room. So here goes.

The Good: From a technical perspective- both in the sense of “getting newer software” and “technical community being more involved in bugfixes, etc”- having *a version* of CentOS called “AppStream” is fantastic. The various RedHat and CentOS folks who have been extolling these virtues in blog posts and twitter feeds are right-on. But from responses I’ve seen, it appears to me that they think that these virtues are enough to completely gloss over the complete and utter clusterfrackas they’ve caused.

The Bad: No point releases. There is POSITIVELY NO* REASON that they can’t have AppSream and still do point releases. Brand new stuff would go into AppStream, at some point they do a point release of RHEL, then follow the normal CentOS procedure to spin a CentOS build of that point release. This is already a tried and true process. It will cost RedHat all of what, low five digits (if that) in developer salary to do this. Heck I’m sure some volunteers would step up to use the existing infrastructure if RedHat didn’t want to spend any paid developer time on this.

The Ugly: I denoted “NO* REASON” above because there actually *are*
reasons that we are not privy to. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPKr/status/1336744681716244480 Since RedHat is not being transparent with this, we are forced to speculate and remain bewildered at why they would make a decision that is going to cost them so much in the long run. The most common (and most likely)
theory is that some MBA somewhere in middle management saw all of this CentOS being used in production environments (and otherwise downloaded for free), and had the idea that if CentOS had its head cut off people would just buy RHEL subscriptions.

That may happen in a few cases, but for the most part, that is NOT
what is going to happen. By handling the CentOS situation in this way, RedHat has branded itself as a company that acts in bad faith. If a company acts in bad faith towards a community where non-monetary value is exchanged, WHY would you trust that company to hold up its obligations for contracts that are actually paid? People are going to do whatever they can to get away from RedHat. Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE
will all benefit from this. Even in cases where non-profits and other similar clients “contact RedHat about options because Stream won’t meet their needs”- why would such entities have ANY reason to trust anything that RedHat says to them?

There have been hundreds of other messages that describe exactly what RedHat loses in this deal so I won’t go into that here. But branding oneself as a “bad faith actor” is usually a terrible way to try to pick up a little bit of subscription revenue. In the end it’s going to be a losing scenario. This is an absolutely UNMITIGATED DISASTER
from a marketing and community goodwill standpoint.

It can, however, be mitigated if RedHat backtracks, admits their mistake, and affirmatively commits to support future CentOS point releases. I’ll be interested to see how this turns out.

–JK

14 thoughts on - CentOS 8 Stream: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

  • Well said, Joshua!

    Very articulate!

    RedHat is making a mistake, unless the higher-ups at IBM are driving this, but who knows?

  • Le 10/12/2020 à 00:51, Joshua Kramer a écrit :

    Reactions from competent sources all over the world are downright negative.

    https://linuxfr.org/news/CentOS-se-saborde-t-elle

    https://kofler.info/nachruf-auf-CentOS/

    And this petition launched a bit more than a day ago already counts 3500
    signatures (and growing fast):

    https://www.change.org/p/CentOS-governing-board-do-not-destroy-CentOS-by-using-it-as-a-rhel-upstream

    If I was a CentOS developer or a Red Hat employee, a mere glance at the comments would inform me that I’ve just made a disastrous decision. Even if there *may* be *some* technical merits to it.

    Cheers,

    Niki

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  • Hi,

    I can only second what has been said in all the posts to this list during the past hours and days.

    Still, I’d like to quickly express my view on the situation:

    RedHat has made a BIG mistake, most likely the biggest in their history and one can only wonder how this could happen. They have disappointed so many people who were supporting them in what they did and were a driver of their business by attracting customers to buy from RedHat.

    To me it’s clear that “the child has already fallen into the well”. It’s like in a marriage, you know where the red line is and you don’t cross it
    – until you like to make insane decisions.

    Right now I have not decided where to go next but I’m sad to realize that there is one Open Source company less to trust in future. I’m not sure the decision makers were really aware what they did to a large community of promoters of their business but I guess it won’t have a positive impact in the long run.

    Thanks to the CentOS team for all their hard work over all the years! You really didn’t deserve this to happen.

    Kind regards, Simon

  • Am 10.12.20 um 07:09 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:

    It must be a strong management when they roll back. Hope is the last one that die …

    —
    Leon

  • It may already be too late. Even if RedHat says “my bad” and goes back on this decision, not many will trust them in the future.

    Steve

  • El jue, 10 dic 2020 a las 9:39, Steve Thompson ()
    escribió:

    The funniest thing is Change Advocates that say: “Don’t spread the FUD, CentOS Stream will be quite stable….!” and at same time state:

    “If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.”

    https://blog.CentOS.org/2020/12/future-is-CentOS-stream/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=future-is-CentOS-stream

    —
    —
    Sergio Belkin LPIC-2 Certified – http://www.lpi.org

  • Even so, it’s the least they are expected to do. Just say “OK, we are having our company planning, but our planning and operations are deeply affected by our community, so we cannot remain indifferent to their loud feedback; we shall support CentOS 8 as initially announced for its complete life-cycle and we guarantee that officially.”

    If they shut their ears to to the whole world, it’s an even bigger mistake.

    Nick

  • My first impression when I read the news was that some MBA had made the decision and I decided to find out if there were Red Hat developers Unemployed … :-), which would give me light that it was a decision made at the point of excel spreadsheets.

  • Yeah — no one is unemployed. There really are not a lot of people working on CentOS Stream or the rebuild, all told, and the part about wanting to refocus all of the energy on Stream to make it successful is 100% true.

  • I appreciate the sincerity on your part Matthew, with this I stay, to begin the technical conversations with the different actors that we have in different business areas, I hope this does not hit so hard the trust that was had in RH because sincerely I I no longer believe in words because as the saying goes, “the wind blows them away,” even though a promise was written, but the important thing is to move on and this is the thrill of life.

    Regards!