CentOS is dead, long live CentOS Stream

Posted Dec 8, 2020 17:10 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: CentOS is dead, long live CentOS Stream by aklaver
Parent article: CentOS is dead, long live CentOS Stream

I can't find it now - but sometime in the last month or so in the comments here on LWN, there was one saying "no one develops on Red Hat any more". In looking for it here just now, I found Ladislav Bodner from 2003 suggesting that it was time to move to Debian as Red Hat Enterprise Linux came in and Red Hat 9 was the last Free software - Fedora was still just about coalescing at that time.

If you've been using CentOS to up-skill because your enterprise uses Red Hat - walk away. If you can't afford to deploy Red Hat on a large scale - walk away and take up Ubuntu or Debian. If you want Red Hat self-paced training, be prepared to pay as much for it as if you were running Solaris years ago. If you run HPC - maybe you should have listened 20 years ago :)

If you were a Fedora Linux developer unsure of your place in the Red Hat ecosystem when CentOS was brought into the mix - well you know now. If you're one of the relatively small number of independent CentOS developers - you know how much your influence has been sought. CentOS 6 has just gone EOL: I see nobody bothered much with a release announcement for CentOS 8.3 - that's how much the community communicates..

Scientific Linux dropped the workload of maintaining a Red Hat-alike in favour of recommending CentOS 8 - I wonder what they'll do now. Red Hat is all Kubernetes and similar now: Jim Whitehurst (immediately ex-Red Hat and IBM president) must have absolute certainty that this is a good course of action but I can't see it.
[Personal view, not reflecting any other affiliation.]

CentOS is dead, long live CentOS Stream

Posted Dec 8, 2020 18:53 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

> If you were a Fedora Linux developer unsure of your place in the Red Hat ecosystem when CentOS was brought into the mix - well you know now.

I don't think this is what you are trying to say, but... yes, that's very much what this announcement brings for me. When Red Hat brought CentOS inside, Red Hat was in the midst of a transition from being a single-product company to a porfolio-product one. This caused a lot of friction between Fedora and what were then called "layered products". CentOS as a closer-to-RHEL base was seen as a solution for this. The hope was that CentOS would provide a more-RHEL-like community place for work like RDO (OpenStack) or oVirt or OpenShift to happen. That was partially successful, but the plan wasn't really realized.

From a Fedora point of view, "Fedora is failing at a thing we need so we'll turn to CentOS" wasn't a healthy dynamic for either project, but the overlap has been uneasy and sometimes confusing. There was talk of waterfalls and virtuous cycles and something about a coffee percolator, but mostly it was just a mess. I mean, just look at the title of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6jHWC2MrZg.

The CentOS Stream arrangement makes everything much more clear. We no longer need to resort to impossible geometry to describe the relationships!

There was an internal presentation featuring a "layer cake" model which I really liked, which went something like this:

Blue: Community space | Fedora Linux | community engineering decisions | community support

Purple: Shared space | CentOS Stream | transparent Red Hat engineering decisions with community input | community support

Red: Product | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat engineering decisions with customer input | product support

Now, "Red Hat engineering decisions" might seem a bit scary, but consider that in CentOS Linux, all of the distro-contents engineering decisions were also made by Red Hat, but inside without any transparency. And if you're unsure about community engineering decisions and Fedora's independence … buy me a beverage sometime and ask me about Btrfs!