Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 11, 2020 6:54 UTC (Fri) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960)
In reply to: Changing CentOS in mid-stream by pbonzini
Parent article: Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Red Hat has wanted to kill CentOS for *years* as they dont seem to understand the path that many orgs take to becoming a RHEL customer is through CentOS. But I'm fairly sure the order to actually stick the knife in came from somebody at IBM.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 11, 2020 7:37 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

If that conviction makes you feel better, who am I to dispute that...

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 13, 2020 20:38 UTC (Sun) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (7 responses)

I believe RH actually knows their customers better than random internet commenters do.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 17, 2020 23:22 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link] (6 responses)

If Redhat knows its customers well then why did they imagine they would be content with flipping the basic Centos premise from stability to adventure?

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 25, 2020 22:31 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (5 responses)

Centos users aren't customers. Customers are people that pay you money for the work you do for them. Those customers were perhaps asking red hat why their competitors got access to the same software workout paying for it, gaining an advantage. That isn't something you want your customers to ask.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Feb 4, 2021 14:17 UTC (Thu) by emailstorbala (guest, #144622) [Link] (4 responses)

Redhat users pays for the support. The product is an open source and hence it is rebranded as Centos (so is Oracle Linux and Scientific Linux). Kernel, filessystem, packages are all created and maintained by upstream.

So technically a customer who has paid money is paying for an issue case support and not for the RHEL itself. And support types differ and it payment also differs.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Feb 4, 2021 14:28 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> Kernel, filesystem, packages are all created and maintained by upstream.

This is _not_ the case for RHEL (and its derivatives..)

Red Hat packages everything shipped in RHEL, and shoulders all of the maintenance work.

Upstreams only tend to care about RHEL (and backporting fixes to decade-old releases) when Red Hat is paying their salaries. (which, to be fair, they do quite a lot of!)

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Feb 4, 2021 20:33 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Note that Red Hat also gets packages certified for use by FIPS and for within SCIF infrastructure ("secure rooms"). For these cases, it is many times a *specific build* that is certified; a rebuild is *not* certified (I don't think Reproducible Builds factors into it; that may be considered sufficient for most, but these checkbox security things tend not to care about the bits as much as the color of the bits[1]).

[1]https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Feb 5, 2021 6:35 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

To be fair, if you care about FIPS and have a SCIF, you probably can pay for RHEL licenses out of your paperclip budget.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Feb 5, 2021 14:29 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, NIST 800 is making FIPS an easy go-to for checkbox compliance. And a SCIF could be had at companies of all sizes; it really depends on the projects and data they're working on.