[Wolves] CentOS

Adam Sweet adamsweet at gmail.com
Wed Dec 9 12:52:36 UTC 2020


On 08/12/2020 18:23, Chris Ellis via Wolves
<wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> Looks like CentOS is dead, at least as we know it!
> 
> https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=future-is-centos-stream
> 
> Ironically it looks like Red Hat is restructuring CentOS along the
> lines of the relationship SUSE has with openSUSE.

Lots of good discussion on this on the Birmingham and Shropshire lists
already, but I'll add my 2p.

I can understand the financial motivation to push CentOS users towards
RHEL for those that need the rock solid OS and new releases every few
years. I can understand that a rolling release distro that sits "just
ahead" of RHEL's development meets the needs of a subsection of its
users, but that phrase 'just ahead' is doing an awful lot of the work in
that sentence and this is ultimately a disaster for the people that use
CentOS because they need the stability and QA that Red Hat provides, but
can't afford to pay for Red Hat. There's a debate there about business
viability, but sometimes money is tight.

I had wondered what was in it for Red Hat when they brought the CentOS
team in-house but figured that it enabled CentOS users to buy support
from RH when they needed it, which was money that RH otherwise wouldn't
have seen.

I see there's already significant backlash about this and many saying
this may well be IBM's influence. Red Hat has always been an exemplary
custodian of Open Source as far as I'm aware. They pay lots of people to
work on things that need to be done but don't directly benefit their
business, but this is really going to upset the apple cart for a lot of
people.

A key thing I noted from the Birmingham list is that as recently as 1st
Dec, the CentOS website said CentOS 8 (released in Sept 2019) was
supported until 31 May 2029, but now that date is 31 December 2021 when
it becomes a rolling release sitting 'just ahead' of RHEL development.
That means people have been installing version 8 for over a year
believing they will get 10 years of security patches and the rug has
been pulled out from under them. As Tim Williams points out, people make
long term business decisions based on these things. If it had been
announced ahead of release then people could make informed choices about
installing it.

As it happens, this doesn't affect me, or any of my customers to my
knowledge but I wonder about all those appliance style products that use
CentOS as a base. Nagios XI, another Nagios based system called OP5
Monitor and other things like ClearOS all use CentOS as a base OS. There
must be loads of others.

I can't help thinking this will shaft existing CentOS 8 users and
ultimately push many people to either Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE.

> People looking for a new enterprise distro, should take a good look at
> openSUSE Leap.  All the slow and stable benefits of old fangled
> releases but for free.  Leap shares the kernel and core runtime
> packages with it's enterprise counterpart SLES.  Infact the upcoming
> iteration of Leap/Jump will be sharing these dependencies in a binary
> identical way.

Chris, for the benefit of discussion can you explain the relationship
between SLES, openSUSE and what Leap and Jump are in terms of cost and
release cycle?

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