> I don’t really need to exactly match RHEL’s point releases. I don’t need 100% binary compatibility with RHEL.
That's good, because regular old CentOS is not bit-for-bit identical either. CentOS might strip out all the RHEL trademarks, but they had to reverse engineer RHEL code drops just like Oracle, Amazon, Google, Facebook, SuSE, etc.
> The upstreams serve me well enough.
What you don't appreciate is that the distinction between upstream/downstream is a broken metaphor across small time scales. Bug fixes and backports will show up in any number of RHEL clones from Oracle|Amazon|Facebook|Google|Baidu|Samsung before making their way into Fedora|CentOS and finally into RHEL. In the future, RHEL will release their own bugfixes to subscription customers before those fixes find their way into CentOS Stream.
That's the meat grinder of a Linux distribution: uptime "guarantees" are just refunds you get to cash in when a large devops team can't fix a problem fast enough.
> The one thing I can’t get over though, is the decision to roll out this change in the middle of CentOS 8’s lifecycle, trimming out what, 8 years or so of support. That seriously stung. This decision should have been made a year or two ago, before CentOS 8 was released.
If you have a kernel that hasn't been updated in over three years and you need very low downtime, you either have a dedicated operations crew or you don't let it touch the internet.
But if you are so cheap that you don't want to pay for bandwidth/build servers yet aren't willing to violate the "developer" license agreement ... then use a RHEL clone from Amazon|Oracle. They are already undercutting Red Hat support packages, why not make them foot the bandwidth bill too?
Everyone else should be celebrating: Red Hat is basically turning CentOS Stream into a spot where they can collaborate with their frenemies and ship more software faster.
Qubes developers for example, have been spread very thin by Fedora's six month release cycle. Switching away from an RPM distro would be too difficult but CentOS lags too far behind mainline (5 years!) to be useful. If Red Hat can step up their game and push out a major release very 3 years and get the "pipeline" between Fedora and CentOS working ... maybe they can win some market share back from Debian and Ubuntu.
> That's good, because regular old CentOS is not bit-for-bit identical either. CentOS might strip out all the RHEL trademarks, but they had to reverse engineer RHEL code drops just like Oracle, Amazon, Google, Facebook, SuSE, etc.
Do you have a source for SUSE reverse engineering RHEL code drops? Last I checked they were unrelated.
That's good, because regular old CentOS is not bit-for-bit identical either. CentOS might strip out all the RHEL trademarks, but they had to reverse engineer RHEL code drops just like Oracle, Amazon, Google, Facebook, SuSE, etc.
> The upstreams serve me well enough.
What you don't appreciate is that the distinction between upstream/downstream is a broken metaphor across small time scales. Bug fixes and backports will show up in any number of RHEL clones from Oracle|Amazon|Facebook|Google|Baidu|Samsung before making their way into Fedora|CentOS and finally into RHEL. In the future, RHEL will release their own bugfixes to subscription customers before those fixes find their way into CentOS Stream.
That's the meat grinder of a Linux distribution: uptime "guarantees" are just refunds you get to cash in when a large devops team can't fix a problem fast enough.
> The one thing I can’t get over though, is the decision to roll out this change in the middle of CentOS 8’s lifecycle, trimming out what, 8 years or so of support. That seriously stung. This decision should have been made a year or two ago, before CentOS 8 was released.
If you have a kernel that hasn't been updated in over three years and you need very low downtime, you either have a dedicated operations crew or you don't let it touch the internet.
But if you are so cheap that you don't want to pay for bandwidth/build servers yet aren't willing to violate the "developer" license agreement ... then use a RHEL clone from Amazon|Oracle. They are already undercutting Red Hat support packages, why not make them foot the bandwidth bill too?
Everyone else should be celebrating: Red Hat is basically turning CentOS Stream into a spot where they can collaborate with their frenemies and ship more software faster.
Qubes developers for example, have been spread very thin by Fedora's six month release cycle. Switching away from an RPM distro would be too difficult but CentOS lags too far behind mainline (5 years!) to be useful. If Red Hat can step up their game and push out a major release very 3 years and get the "pipeline" between Fedora and CentOS working ... maybe they can win some market share back from Debian and Ubuntu.