You build software, you ship it on an OS so it works, cool, this makes sense (I assume you need hardware and VM support, not just VM).

Why would you accept additional risk on the OS if you can easily reduce the risk, and ultimate cost, by going with an OS that has vendor support written into the actual contract? RHEL is 11-13 years total, Windows is... I'm guessing my grandkids will be using some form of Windows 10. CentOS is, and always was a community "best effort", with some serious delays occasionally (not often, but it happened).

A RHEL server license starts at $349, I have to assume that's at least an order of magnitude (or two or three) less than the cost of your software based on the technologies involved (sounds enterprise-solutiony). In other words a rounding error overall.

And that is exactly what IBM is counting on. Vendor lock in.

We are switching to Debian-based distros because, frankly, we don't trust IBM not to knife us in the back even on RHEL for more money. Of course we have the advantage of being able to take the time to convert.

CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat's upstream for layered products (at the time mostly RDO/OpenStack and oVirt/RHEV) could not use Fedora because it was too far from RHEL a year of two after RHEL was released, could not use RHEL because upstream contributors would have to pay, and could not use CentOS because its releases had too large delays. The solution was to make CentOS releases happen timely by paying people to make them.

These days a RHEL downstream is not enough for the layered products. Some of them require the kind of bleeding edge feature that is backported every six months to the RHEL kernel, and corresponding userspace changes (BPF, virtualization, etc.) and cannot afford waiting for the CentOS release because development must be done in parallel with RHEL. So the solution was to move CentOS from happening after RHEL to before RHEL which is what CentOS Stream is.

I can confidently say that the reasons are technical because other CentOS downstream have the same needs (e.g. Facebook's) and they also want to send patches to CentOS for bugfixes or features themselves, instead of waiting for Red Hat to find out about that bug, or decide they need the same feature. Plus there's no reason for rebuilds to disappear. The SRPMs will still be released by Red Hat.

CentOS was a community project whose leadership and control was taken over (acqui-hired as you say) by Red Hat and then it's core use case for the majority of people actually using it was discontinued. That is a statement of facts that happened as I understand them, not some spin on my part.

If Red Hat had not stepped in, perhaps some of CentOS problems (trouble getting releases out on time) would have been worse, or perhaps some other companies would have stepped in. We don't know, but we do know that CentOS has not been changed to be something different than it was before. It used to be a free re-spin of RHEL. Going forward it's something entirely different.

Red Hat always had the option to stop funding/providing resources to CentOS and name their new thing something else, but they didn't, and now they've effectively co-opted CentOS to be something different than it was originally intended to be.

Because they don't need it anymore. CentOS Linux or other rebuilds can still exist (just not using the name; I disagree with that but I can understand Red Hat doesn't want its name attached to something that might have large delays in security fixes in the future) if somebody funds it or volunteers to do it, just like CentOS still supports Xen but RHEL does not.

Also for what is worth there have been lots of engineering changes to RHEL in the past couple of years that make nightlies (and CentOS Stream) much more stable than they used to be, especially with respect to regressions. Running CentOS Stream is not going to be like Fedora Rawhide or Debian sid.

I understand the business reasons for doing so. I don't agree with anyone branding this as done for purely technical reasons. Having CentOS Stream may be needed for technical reasons. Stopping CentOS 8 is in no way a technical decision. They are unrelated in any technical sense.

If Red Hat just doesn't want to put resources towards CentOS as it traditionally existed anymore, that's their option, but they deserve any flak they get for taking over an open source project just to extinguish it, since CentOS is in no way really needs to be linked to their Stream product. They could just as easily called it RHEL Stream and said it's free, and it would be a less confusing and more direct funnel of people that want RHEL stability into RHEL subscriptions. Using the CentOS name is just a mind-share grab and screwing over an open source community. They control it so can do it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to call them out for doing so.

If I effectively took control of the EFF and then a couple years later changed the website copy to say that the EFF is a vehicle for litigating cases that kbenson thinks are important, and then actually changed its actions to do so, would you argue the same points? How is this any different? Something that was a net good for many people has been taken over and eventually killed. I think we're all worse off for that.

I don't disagree.

Isn’t that the crux of the problem? CentOS used to be about “us” (the users), not “them.”

In particular I started doing that and I got to the Sep 2019-Dec 2019 range, around the time CentOS Stream was launched. At that time this:

> For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon

was changed to this:

> CentOS Linux is a consistent, manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For some open source communities, it is a solid, predictable base to build upon.

They're a business ... are you honestly and in good-faith actually confused about this outcome?

This is a really smart more on their part to get people to stop doing precisely this, and getting them to pay money for RH. Pepople who are not willing to pay (me included) are now rightly annoyed, but we were never their customers in the first place, so we don't really matter.

Now? “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“ Probably Debian.

I’ve always used CentOS for clusters, but part of the reason for that is that there are some research packages that support RPM installation, but not deb. At least this gas historically been the case.

If a large amount (maybe even a majority) of users have to switch away from CentOS and RPM packaging, I think we’ll see an acceleration away from RPM as a default option.

So, in that way, I think we do matter, but just not on the balance sheet.

I have a hard time imagining, and the only scenarios that come to mind are those where things have gone awfully haywire.

I'm sure I'm missing something. Enlighten me?

Depending on how good is the source, its usefulness and dependencies, packaging it to Debian is pretty straight forward. The dh_* helpers[2] does the job automatically most of the time. There is also tools for helping with specific languages, like dh-make-golang, dh-python, etc...

[1] https://packages.debian.org/buster/alien

[2] https://manpages.debian.org/testing/debhelper/debhelper.7.en...

It’s not only the differences in the packaging format that you have to take care of. There’s also version differences, path differences, dependency handling, and many other stuff to take care of. These are the kind of tasks which can’t be automated away and require non-trivial amount of work.

For organizations that maintain tens, hundreds, or thousands of CentOS packages that spans multiple teams, moving to other distros would be time-consuming and costly. It would certainly pay off if it was driven by technical reasons, but for organizations that are forced to switch by this announcement, this is just pure overhead.

That's his stack...

>So unless there’s some magic piece of technology that can take CentOS RPMs and make it work flawlessly on any Linux distro,

It's not magic, just alien.

> That's his stack...

What’s your point and when did I ever mention Java?

> It's not magic, just alien.

Dumping the contents of an RPM archive on random distros is never going to work except for the most simple of cases.

That says allot about you packing hygiene, and you don't dump it..that you can do with tar alone. You convert it to a deb.

I suggest you read the source code too, because otherwise you can cause real damage if you use it without understanding how it works.

https://sources.debian.org/src/alien/8.95/alien.pl/

Though my experience with package manager is that dependency management is hell (rife with potential conflicts), so I do see the problem a bit better.

Still, it shouldn't take that long to fix? Like a few days of sprint to setup Nix or something like that?

As for pinning packages, that’s only practical if you’re using Nix. As much as I prefer Nix over RPMs, not all of us have the pleasure of using Nix at work. It’s kind of a bummer because Nix packages are so much easier to work with and maintain compared to the competition.

If you run a for-profit operation, and downtime is costly, you (or your VP of eng) want a way to pay for immediate assistance from the OS's maker / distributor, when (not if) things go wrong.

There is a difference between asking "how do I ensure there is one throat to choke when things go wrong?", and "how do I minimize the potential for things to go wrong?"

RHEL is a decent solution if you are trying to answer the former question (or both), but many budget conscious orgs focused on the latter and chose CentOS. Red Hat has now pulled the rug out from under them by trimming eight years off the EOL previously committed to with little notice.

EOL in this case means "no security updates" so even if your org was prepared, technically, to deal with a zero-day for example by rolling out an update in a timely manner without relying on paying a vendor for hand-holding, that option has now been eliminated.

Essentially, you now only get the stability and problem-minimization if you also pay the vendor for support. Otherwise you're stuck with a (relatively) unstable rolling release that will keep your internal teams very busy with a constant stream of minor issues, or potentially trying to roll-your-own updates or backports after the EOL for anything serious.

It's difficult to see this as anything other than a naked, money-grabbing betrayal of users.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

That's like polar opposites of stability and bleeding edge.

I will argue that there is less maintenance when handling virtual machines images, because it uses less bandwidth and need less tooling around it comparing with container image based infrastructure.

But in general both are nothing more than the golden image concept.

As a sysadmin i have never heard of this and es tun 800 VMs.