I knew what CentOS was, but never followed it because I've never personally had use for it. Still, I appreciate what it did and was glad to have it as an option should I ever need a super stable distro in the future.
That said, I think the FAQ is missing an answer for a critical question: What ultimately drove CentOS to its regrettable fate and what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?
Obvious next question: what drove the CentOS devs to sell to Redhat. From previous discussions, I understood that it came down to lack of resources / devs to maintain and support it. So OP's question is on point: what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?
There isn't any evidence anything causes anything else. Cartesian dualism is irrefutable. So for all we know we live in a world where IBM destroying everything they touch is purely the will of a malevolent daemon who wants to tarnish the good name of the company that enabled the holocaust.
The most frustrating thing about this is that Redhat was making a profit before IBM bought them. They had existed for 20 some years on a business model that business people didn’t understand, and they were able to do that because they understood what open source would become and how they could play a role in that.
One of the things that YC is always talking about is that founders looking for ideas should look to identify situations where most people think it’s going to turn out one way, but most people are wrong and it’s actually going to turn out another way. In the context of the late 90s, where virtually all software was proprietary, they bet on open source software and support plans, and made a sustainable company on it. They contributed to open source so that they would have the expertise, gave all the software away for free, and then sold the expertise through support plans.
And then the business people came along and they’re showing a deep misunderstanding of why Redhat was able to sell support plans in the first place. People on RHEL are going to stay on RHEL, but people on CentOS — the market of people who are not paying customers but could theoretically become customers, are almost certainly going to go to Canonical. This will kill Redhat.
But Red Hat ended up being the exception that proved the rule that selling support for open source isn't a very lucrative business. There was room for one player in that space and Red Hat was it. Now with cloud providers selling support for open source bundled with the infrastructure to run it on, there isn't even room for one standalone player.
Sqlite devs have funded their development decades into the future by selling licenses to public domain software. It may not have made them a billion dollar multinational corporation, but must every company have such conqueror aspiration?
>CentOS 8 was never officially supported until 2029 so we did not go back on anything
The thing though is that RedHat is responsible for that impression. Every previous version of CentOS before 8 has been supported until the upstream RHEL pulled the plug. CentOS’s official page said it would be supported until 2029 ( https://archive.is/7Qmtw ).
A reasonable person would infer that CentOS (now controlled by RedHat, so, yes, RedHat) made the same promise that they made (and kept) with every previous version of CentOS: That it would be supported for 7-10 years. Not just over 2 years.
I definitely inferred a decade of support. If I would had known that CentOS 8 would be cut off at the end of 2021 this summer, I would not had installed it. I would had installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Indeed, replacing my CentOS 8 installs with Ubuntu 20.04 is exactly what I have been spending all last week doing.
I mean, I hate to say this, but have we considered that a big part of the reason RedHat has been profitable is because it doesn’t care about the desktop? And no, Fedora really doesn’t count.
Ubuntu’s big thing back in 2004 was that it was a well-heeled founder (and company), coming in to actually put time and money into the desktop experience on Linux in an opinionated way (obv. not everyone agrees with those opinions, but I would argue that being as opinionated as commercial/proprietary software was Ubuntu’s biggest strength in the beginning). Over the last 16 years, nearly all of the big bets on desktop development have failed. Ubuntu One (the cloud personal cloud service)? Failed (though in retrospect it was a really good idea. Too bad users didn’t pay.). Ubuntu Software Center? Failed and discontinued. Unity? Failed and discontinued. Ubuntu Phone/Touch (and Canonical had invested massively into mobile)? Failed and given to the community. Mir? Failed, probably for good reasons, but failed.
Where has Canonical made money? Enterprise and in the cloud.
I totally understand the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but every company that has approached it in a way that is focused on end-users and not the enterprise in a way that isn’t either volunteer driven or as a very small company has failed to make it any money off of it. I imagine Canonical will continue to deemphasize the desktop even more as time goes on.
Honestly, with the way things are going, I would like them to deemphasize the desktop.
Canonical made it easy to recommend linux as a desktop, but then have made it harder as time goes on, with controversies like Snap and the Amazon fiasco. I'm glad for what they have done, and wish them luck in the server space.
There are others who are now better positioned to pick up where Canonical left off on the desktop. ElementaryOS, Pop!_OS, Zorin, all of these are amazing projects that have picked up and pushed forward from where Canonical left.
I agree with you on those projects and Mint, my only response is that they are all much smaller projects that lack the funding and size/force of will that Ubuntu was able to achieve. That isn’t to take away from them at all, but aside from System 76 (a boutique reseller who until recently has primarily just sold re-badged Taiwanese laptops (good laptops to be sure, Clevo is a solid ODM), most of them are either largely community projects or very nascent businesses with a few full-time employees.
Again, that isn’t a criticism — I’m friends with some members of the elementary team and absolutely love what they do — truly. But none of those projects can make the type of investment that Canonical did or that the other big Linux vendors who have all but abandoned the desktop (SuSE/Novell, Red Hat) did, or even now-bankrupt/sold for pennies to PE companies did (Mandriva (née Mandrake), Corel, Linspire (remember those crooks!)) or that some promised to do, but later abandoned (Steam).
Maybe that’s OK. Maybe the number of Linux desktop users is content with work being done and sustained largely by community volunteers or very small companies. But as good as the work many of those groups do is, I do think the lack of a Canonical type of company does hurt the whole ecosystems ability to grow, innovate, and reliably attract new users. On a personal level, I think that everyone should give up the pretense of Linux on the desktop ever evolving beyond an extremely niche thing, and be content that the Linux kernel is at least the basis for stuff like ChromeOS and Android (which while absolutely not Linux on the desktop or on mobile, are at least major desktop platforms), but that’s just me.
Deepin is interesting because it has a strong source of funding and developers/partners and has made really great moves on the UI front and it’s partnerships with ZTE and Huawei (Huawei even ships Deepin on many of its machines now). My personal concern with Deepin is the security and privacy with it — and I have those same concerns for any state-sponsored version of Linux or any operating system to be honest. Deepin is also very insular in its development (far more than even Ubuntu), and that might just be necessary to achieve the sort of polish it has, but that distinct lack of community could be a turn-off to many.
What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily disagree with your assertion that Canonical should pull out from the desktop even more, but I think a lot of people underestimate just how big of a void that will leave in the desktop space and as good as those projects you mentioned are, I don’t think any of them individually or collectively can fill it. Especially financially.
That said, I think the FAQ is missing an answer for a critical question: What ultimately drove CentOS to its regrettable fate and what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?