While I agree with you, it is fair to say RH has an unusual amount of leverage with respect to forcing things. They directly control a lot of big ticket projects, and have powerful leadership positions in others. They can coordinate major changes across the board and the momentum they can throw behind some decisions can certainly exert a LOT of pressure. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though - as you note it can be good to have a leader, but it's also something that can be detrimental too.
Re:Rocky Linux 9.0
by freedomben on Friday July 15, 2022 @12:14AM
(#32104547)
Agreed!
> I don't agree with everything about the decision, but I don't think it's as bad as most people say it is[1].
It was bad because when I chose CentOS for servers at work I thought I could count on letting them live their lives for about 10 years without worrying about them. I have a lot of things to do and taking care of those servers is a very low priority.
Thank God there was a script to convert my CentOSes to Rocky and that it went great, otherwise it would have taken time I don't have to reinstall those servers.
Re:Rocky Linux 9.0
by freedomben on Friday July 15, 2022 @01:07PM
(#32110355)
Yes I will 100% grant on that one. Pulling the plug so early on CentOS was low and I don't think they should have done that.
The whole "we never put an EOL date on it" excuse was really weak. It looks to nearly everyone like just an unintentional omission, not a legal hedge. It ended up working out well like you said thanks to Alma and Rocky, but the panic and uncertainty it caused was wholly unnecessary.
You are definitely right that RH has pushed things in their own interest, but if those things don't offer value to the broader community, then the community won't adopt them. Red Hat can't force Debian or Ubuntu or Arch to adopt anything. They can push it through Fedora Cent and RHEL, but that's it. The other distros adopted systemd because it offered benefits/improvements over existing things like Upstart. I like firewalld, but that's a good example of something that is only on RH despite RH pushing it. If systemd was really such a negative, then you'd see distros like Devuan take off. A frequent criticism is things like, "Red Hat made Gnome dependent on systemd" which isn't wrong, but they didn't just do it because they could. There were real benefits there.
I think the reality of life is that there will always be people who want things to change, and those who don't want the change. To succeed you have to find a balance.
Also important to remember when decrying "fragmentation" (which I decry also btw), in a massive heterogeneous community like open source, you're gonna have users who have completely different needs and use cases, and both are valid. The beauty of it is the code is open and free, so people can serve niche use cases as well as standard.
[1]: Query string gets you past the "monthly limit" paywall that sometimes pops up: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...