> But the current issues are not to do with Centos being underfunded
You make good points but I think this one is wrong on the face of it -
this current situation is entirely down to the mass consumers of CentOS
(not the active community or devs; the freeloaders) not supporting their
miraculous freebie whatsover. RedHat wouldn't have been able to reverse
takeover the CentOS project in the first place if it had been healthy,
well funded and vibrant - they would have/could have refused and stayed
independent. CentOS was unfortunately all about entitled businesses
taking what they needed without nourishing the source of their free
enterprise OS rebuild though, so they all got what they deserved in the end.
That's unnecessarily harsh, and I don't think it's even accurate.
Centos is chosen by businesses for a variety of reasons, of which price is but one. It's not free - this is the exact reason why RHEL is also used by businesses, it's just the cost is distributed differently. You don't get support with Centos, so your business needs a higher level of sysadmin/engineer - that's not free. It's more flexible, as those admins will also do stuff unrelated to core Centos, and it's a choice business makes. Some prefer the reassurance and models that come with a paid support contract for their OS, and that's why RHEL exists. Centos exists because it's built be the community.
Of course, those who don't know better will take a look at the model and go "Huh, so Centos Linux is just repackaged RHEL - why should they get to use it for nothing?"
But that's massively missing where RHEL comes from - it comes from Fedora and the thousands of contributions in that happy little world of bleeding edge chaos. Those contributions are sometimes funded by businesses (the big software titles, some kernel development etc), and made freely available. That's the give and take of business, that's where business "gives back". (Of course, not all businesses do, certainly the majority don't have the resource, will or ability to)
Redhat making a big thing of "We'll soften the blow by not preventing anyone continuing to re-package RHEL and distribute how they like" is particularly disingenuous and annoying, since they can't. RHEL is built on free software protected by licences. Mighty give of them to allow what is legally mandatory, eh?
it's designed to be used for. People always mistook "painfully archaic"
for "stable" and it was barely fit for purpose without ElRepo, RPMFusion
and rebuilding half the stuff yourself.
I had my suspicions, but now I'm utterly convinced: Your linux world is very different to mine.
In my particular linux world, Centos base fits our business model well. We don't need bleeding edge - we need a reliable, predictable base that we build our own software onto. Centos is, sorry, was, that.
That's not being blind to the future, we do stuff with (confidential filter applied) which is fairly modern, and when we need to, I'm sure we'll adopt it.
I didn't really make a very coherent job of explaining how CentOS will
shortly disappear either entirely now you mention it - to clarify, it
Semantics, really, but I stand by that statement. Centos will continue because it's now part of the RHEL development cycle and useful for them. That it's not the same Centos we knew before is irrelevant, Centos is whatever Redhat decide it is. Their name, their party. The community that built it and put a lot of time and skill into building it simply do not enter into consideration. They either adapt or go elsewhere. That's happening and Redhat expected it, they don't NEED that skillset any more for the new way.
most cases. What I should have said is that soon it will be replaced
entirely - in name only - by whatever Rocky OS eventually becomes. So in
If it's not called Centos, it's not Centos - don't fall into that trap of "It looks, behaves and smells like a Duck, ergo it is" - Fine for defining ducks, not for trademarked entities. I think it's more helpful to use proper names to avoid blurring.
And Rocky is but one contender. Oracle linux is already doing it and has an easy migration script from centos (but, eww, it's Oracle), Scientific (big question mark), CERN roll their own RHEL build, and there's at least two others that are getting a lot of interest. (Including one beginning with C that I forget the name of, but is claiming to have a C8 alternative ready in Q1 2021)
It's too soon to say whether Rocker or others will emerge as the leading alternative. It's good for us that it will happen, but it means tearing apart the community - the humans - that made Centos good.
And legacy Linux is going away now, the future is already here. Just
(In some places, not all)
look how the hyperscalers tech is filtering down and replacing the
amateur-hour clumsy handbuilt crap we've grown up with. All young
techies live and breathe docker now. Systemd, cgroups, it's already
happened: even the CentOS you're currently using is containerized. It's
VMs and containerization all the way down now - and VMs are dying too.
We partition at the hardware level now, and containerize the rest of the
stack. And build/deploy automatically to Kubernetes with a single click.
Sure, but inertia is a thing. It's all well and good to claim that this is the way forwards, or even the way now - but even for those who want that, it's not so trivial to pilot a business from point A to point B. And frankly, a great number of businesses are really happy sitting at Point A.
I keep describing businesses as things. Bad habit, because really - they're people. Humans make these decisions, and humans are influenced by things like other companies/humans making bad faith decisions that have negative consequences. Humans make choices based on what they know, what they're familiar with, what they think will work. They'll use what their friends recommend, or something that has a good reputation. That's why this decision matters.
Redhat has generally been a good servant to the linux world, but now... It's a faithful old dog that's just taken a big crap on your best rug. Not only that, it's making it clear that that's it's crapping place now, and there's nothing you can do about it, nor can the people who made and clean the rug. So screw you.
