Re:Red Hat Goes Full IBM and Says Farewell to CentOS
by formerly_proven on Sunday December 13, 2020 @07:59AM
(#25406273)
If you are running corporate IT on CentOS to save a few bucks over RHEL, any issues are 100 % on the maker of that decision. Because it's a dumb decision.
Re:Red Hat Goes Full IBM and Says Farewell to CentOS
by heelix on Sunday December 13, 2020 @10:09AM
(#25407046)
Licensing itself is a pain in the ass. We pay low teens for Oracle Java licenses. Every year we have to audit hundreds of thousands of machines to see if it is present. When it is, figure out if it is a public version or something that requires an extended support contract. There are things like Adopt OpenJDK that don't require any licenses. Having an OS where you did not need to worry about the licensing was huge - nobody cares what you did in a docker image, on a VM, or some experiment.
I think we were shelling out around $300 a RHEL license, which was a significant percentage of the docker boxes we started putting together with some low end hardware.
Re:Red Hat Goes Full IBM and Says Farewell to CentOS
by dingaling on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:47AM
(#25407844)
The point being that there is a trade-off to be made between paying for an OS instance and having certainty of support, versus community distros with no upfront sticker price but might cost more in man-hours when things fall apart.
Anything run-the-business should have support. Anything used by developers for R&D / messing about can be unsupported.
Re:Red Hat Goes Full IBM and Says Farewell to CentOS
by j605 on Saturday December 12, 2020 @07:57PM
(#25403312)
If companies want something to be reliable and accountable then paying for RHEL seems like the obvious thing to do. They are able to pay for Windows but why not for RHEL. The current change is not unexpected given their acquisition.
That's absolutely a reasonable point of view -- for your use case.
From the perspective of a variety of folks, including corporate IT, makers/vendors of drop-in appliances and other folks, the changes to the CentOS product will be disruptive.
This is because production servers and appliances generally need to run, for extended periods (measured in years) the application set specifically designed and implemented for the particular set of software versions on a particular OS/distro.
For many of the above folks, CentOS fit that bill nicely, as it reliably tracked (that is, was slightly behind) a commercial (i.e., you need to purchase a support contract to access updates and support from the vendor) Linux distro (Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- RHEL), but did not require any support contracts or fees above those for hardware, installation and administration.
The problems for the above implementation/management/administration strategy comes out of changes to the CentOS long term support policy.
CentOS (with versions 6 and 7) provide(d) a ten year support window for those versions and promised the same for CentOS 8 (released in 2019).
Many of those who had chosen CentOS for it's free (as in gratis[0]) access to the commercial RHEL platform took CentOS (whose developers/maintainers were hired by RedHat[1] to continue that work in 2014) at its word that support for CentOS 8 would also be supported for that same ten year span, updated their environments and applications to the latest version.
That promise of support has now been rescinded, as CentOS will now be the gamma/release candidate version of RHEL and will lead RHEL slightly rather than trail it.
AIUI, there are many reasons for this change to CentOS development, the biggest being that Fedora (the community project that RHEL used as its Beta platform) is now so far ahead (via its rolling release schedule -- for example the RHEL/CentOS 8 kernel is v4.18 vs. Fedora 33 kernel v. 5.9 -- more than two years) that it's no longer providing that utility.
I absolutely understand why some folks are upset, but claims that "CentOS is dead" and the like are rather hyperbolic in my estimation.
Disclosure: I have no financial interest in IBM or Red Hat, nor am I a user of CentOS
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
[1] https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu...