CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it [LWN.net]

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 23, 2023 23:23 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

This article completely mischaracterizes the precarious state of CentOS at the time that Red Hat acquired it. They were in dire straits at the time, way behind in publishing updates to CentOS6 and months after RHEL7 was released, CentOS7 wasn't ready. Like so many other examples in the F/OSS world, it turns out that there were a lot of *users* of CentOS, but nearly no actual contributors, and even fewer willing to fund anything. Hardly an example of a "vibrant community".

RH proceeded to pump a _ton_ of resources into CentOS, brought them back from the brink of death, and over the next few years completely overhauled the RHEL development pipeline from something developed entirely behind closed doors and tossed over the wall to something developed primarily in the open, permitting non-RH folks to materially participate instead of just rebuilding RHEL packages after the fact. By any measure, the "community" is larger and more vibrant than ever.

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CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 24, 2023 10:03 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem with efforts like Centos (and Scientific Linux, and their latest iterations) is that they are interesting for entities that intend to pay as little as possible to Red Hat, but not support the ecosystem any other way, and with such a crowd as backbone it’s no surprising that they are perpetually starved for funds and eventually bankrupt themselves (figuratively of literally).

Rich entities like Microsoft or Amazon that intend to pay as little as possible to Red Hat fork at the Fedora (not RHEL) level and contribute engineering at the Fedora (not RHEL) level to keep their investment safe. And, if there was enough of those RHEL would be just one of many commercial derivatives of Fedora. But most Centos users had no intention to contribute anything but requests, as if software wrote qa-ed and packaged itself.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 24, 2023 13:55 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> But most Centos users had no intention to contribute anything but requests, as if software wrote qa-ed and packaged itself.

"It's work/valuable when I have to do the packaging/testing, but not when $someone_else has to do it."

I'm reminded of the parallels with arguments that it's too much work to package & qa things properly for $distro, so we should all use upstream-provided flatpaks/appimages/tarballs/whatever instead. So it's clearly a lot of work, even from the original software author's perspecive. And the end-user's too, which is why everyone wants RHEL, just at zero cost and effort.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 26, 2023 6:26 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

> which is why everyone wants RHEL

Not really. To be honest if I would never have anything to do with RHEL any more for the rest of my career as a sysadmin I would be happy. It is just so tiny in terms of number of packages and you have to jump through so many hoops to get something that works even half as well as Debian with RHEL.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 27, 2023 12:36 UTC (Tue) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Ugh, I thought I was the only one.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 25, 2023 16:37 UTC (Sun) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

No, the problem is that there is a big lie in the root of the current RHEL distribution policy of IBM/RH.

When I was hired to Red Hat (I have left long ago, and I don’t think I reveal any company secret here) I was told repeatedly that the found of the RH business strategy is that “we don’t sell software, just support, and just for technical reasons (we want to know exactly what binaries are on the supported system, also QA) we require our customers to use our binaries”. It might be even honest statement when I heard it (2006).

Then Oracle thingy happened, and as is usual with that company they went for the most immoral, despicable, and cost effective to grab as much money as they could, including stealing information from RH support to sell to their customers and similar stuff. I don’t know how much money RH actually lost to them, perhaps it truly hurt their bottom line (although I have my doubts), but I know it completely changed RH forever. RH never managed to find a good strategy against them, because RH was never able to go after them hard (what proportion of the real RHELs are sold only to be OS for Oracle DB?), and instead they made steps which irrevocably damaged RH by killing CentOS and all other redistributors of RH SRPMs.

It is yet one another story of greed destroying something beautiful.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jul 3, 2023 6:03 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

> we don’t sell software, just support

This has never been the Red Hat strategy. Selling support causes bad incentives ("don't improve the UX -- that's a big reason people need support! And definitely don't document it!"). Red Hat subscriptions include support, but the value is in expertise and access.

CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

Posted Jun 25, 2023 12:46 UTC (Sun) by pixdrift (guest, #120838) [Link]

Around CentOS 6.0 and 6.1 releases there was definitely trouble, but that was two and a half years prior (2011) to Red Hat getting involved. My memory was update and errata publication was fairly consistent after this time.

CentOS 7.0 released 27 days after RHEL 7.0 shortly after the Red Hat announcement and I believe it still used the existing CentOS build process.

There was a major delay was with CentOS 8.0 which was post Red Hat announcement, and released 140 days after RHEL 8.0.

(CentOS wikipedia pages lists all the dates)

Something else relevant that was happening around this time (2012) was Oracle announcing that they would provide all errata and updates for Oracle Linux on their public yum repo.