
Say Goodbye to CoreOS - eaguyhn
https://thenewstack.io/say-goodbye-to-coreos/
======
parhamn
While I never used CoreOS, the team certainly played a big part in the new
wave of devops. The team also brought us etcd and a lot of the niceties of the
devX in kubernetes et al these days. The article doesn't mention him, but
shoutout to Brandon Phillips (technical lead) and his team for so much
innovation in the space!

~~~
ignoramous
Here's a nice article on CoreOS from 2013, just as they graduated from YC:
[https://www.wired.com/2013/08/coreos-the-new-
linux/](https://www.wired.com/2013/08/coreos-the-new-linux/) ... and the show-
hn thread referenced by tfa:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6128700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6128700)

------
wtmt
> Red Hat, which purchased the company behind CoreOS in 2018, will, as of
> Sept.1, 2020, delete all CoreOS images. That means even if you wanted to
> download CoreOS (without supported updates), you won’t be able to.

> Although Fedora CoreOS is the official replacement for CoreOS, there are a
> few use cases it cannot replace, such as:

> No native support for Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE, Vagrant, or Container Linux
> community-supported platforms. The rkt container runtime, originally
> developed by CoreOS, is missing.

Have these images of CoreOS (that RedHat will delete) not been added to the
Wayback Machine yet? Or not backed up anywhere else?

> For those looking for a non-Red Hat alternative should check out the Flatcar
> Linux project, [1] a fork of CoreOS Container Linux.

So there is an (almost) equivalent alternative for those who use the images
that are going to be deleted (and one that doesn't have the limitations of
Fedora CoreOS)?

[1]: [https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/](https://www.flatcar-
linux.org/releases/)

~~~
mathattack
Is this an issue of RedHat just buying and killing a competitor?

~~~
djsumdog
At least in the open source world, other people can continue maintaining the
project under a new name (dependent on the specific license). I wonder how
Flatcar and Fedora CoreOS will converge/diverge.

Also, was rkt not open source? Or was it just depreciated?

~~~
robszumski
rkt was always open source. It was donated to the CNCF and eventually
"retired" by them.

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peterwwillis
Too soon, I know, but can we soon start talking about abandoning all
corporate-managed open source projects?

I wouldn't be surprised at this move if I were a CoreOS user, but I would be
pretty pissed off that the next 6 months of my work would be migrating to a
new platform for production work, all because the Linux distro I used got
bought for its IP and customer list.

Or, say when HashiCorp is eventually bought, and suddenly its parent company
decides, no more free tools for you, kids! Buy our other, more crappy products
instead, but here's some free samples you can use at small scale. Also you
need to rewrite all your code.

This extends to virtually every important project in the cloud computing
ecosystem. They're all just run by companies, not a distributed decentralized
community of users and developers (cat-herded by a BDFL) like every successful
multi-generational open source project. There's also only one widely-supported
Linux distribution in the world which isn't run by a corporation, meaning if
that distribution ever goes down, everyone who uses Linux for more than its
kernel is at the mercy of that given corporation, and we'll probably see
massive fragmentation.

Open Source and GNU basically got its start to prevent corporations from
preventing you from doing what you wanted with software, but it had a nasty
side-effect: they can now make whatever you do with it obsolete and
unsupportable. A bit like a car manufacturer no longer shipping replacement
parts, forcing you to find some machinists to support an aging fleet of
obsolete vehicles. And sure, if the impact is _only_ to corporate engineers,
who cares, but as one of those engineers, it is very annoying that we
literally are letting them do this to us.

~~~
yodon
This isn't a corporate-managed open source problem, it's a single developer
managed open source problem, with the corporate entity functioning like a
single entity. Tons of great open source project exist as updating projects
through the force of will of a single passionate developer. When that
developer moves on, the project dies. The open source license grants others
the ability to continue, but without that singular developer and their passion
the reality is in most cases no one will pick up the project and carry it
forward. Sure there are examples where projects do survive the death or
disappearance of a maintainer, but there are far more projects out there in
need of a new maintainer than find one.

------
coding123
I think the idea behind it was definitely sound and pretty cool. I used CoreOS
a couple of times for internal projects, using Docker (not rkt) but I think as
Kubernetes became ubiquitously available on managed services, the need for me
to attempt to build my own docker infrastructure started to wane.

Goodbye CoreOS.

------
haolez
I really enjoyed managing a CoreOS cluster in the past. It was one of those
project where every product developed was great, like etcd, Ignition, CoreDNS
and even Fleet, at the time.

I wonder how far they'd have gotten if they'd refused to sell.

~~~
nine_k
Maybe not far if their revenue stream was not large enough.

~~~
haolez
I have no idea what's their case in this regard. Would love some input from
someone who knows.

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leetrout
> will, as of Sept.1, 2020, delete all CoreOS images

I get moving on / cutting product lines but I don’t see the need to delete all
the images.

~~~
coding123
I initially had that internal reaction too, but then realized that the value
in CoreOS was the updates. If they're specifically going to stop that, at this
point it's like any other never gets updates OS (sure the readonly file system
still helps tremendously) - so yes, people should get off ASAP. But the
September date ensures that anyone that wants to fork and provide updates some
other way, can definitely find the time to do that.

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foreign-inc
Finally a non-sponsored article on the newstack.

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yovagoyu
CoreOS, docker, and mesos was an alternative to kubernetes. I'd say while
using flatcar is viable, it looks like kubernetes is what the people have
chosen.

~~~
whalesalad
CoreOS and Kube are not mutually exclusive. The first k8s cluster I ever ran
was on CoreOS.

~~~
mdaniel
Me, too! I got started with both CoreOS and kubernetes using their kubernetes-
in-vagrant repo (before it went to the abysmal rkt runtime:
[https://github.com/coreos/coreos-
kubernetes/blob/v0.4.0/mult...](https://github.com/coreos/coreos-
kubernetes/blob/v0.4.0/multi-node/generic/controller-install.sh) ) and I
shepherded that v1.0.6 cluster all the way up to v1.10 when I left. It was a
highly educational process

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Thaxll
Isn't GKE runs on CoreOS?

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fierarul
I read this as 'Say Goodbye to ChromeOS' and though 'well, Android finally won
inside Google'.

