Red Hat Continues Pleading The Case For Its CentOS Changes

[mroche]

On the plus side, your organization is 100% Microsoft-free, as MSFT doesn't offer any free Windows distros either. Must be nice working in a totally Windows-less world!

Haha, we wish (well, at least us Linux Sysadmins do ). We additionally run with both Windows (software requirements) and macOS, but Linux is the production use-case majority, from both a server and desktop perspective (outside of laptops for which there are only two running CentOS).

Cheers,
Mike

[andre30correia]

yes. It has been confirmed by several reliable sources that this has been a RH move not imposed by IBM. And this make it even more unexplainable.

nobody nows what happens, the real world is about profits and objectives maybe they are not making what IBM want in this terms

[timofonic]

Red Hat had toxic attitudes, but it's getting worse after IBM acquisition.

Red Hat must be made irrelevant. Others must put money to developers to the efforts they do, so their relevance becomes imperceptible.

GNOME monoculture and lack of true and reality strong desktop standards are extremely negative too. That must end ASAP.

I'm not biased to one DE/WE or another. In my opinion 100% of them sucks to a considerable degree for very different reasons, the lack of true and reality strong desktop standards is a major one.

FreeDesktop is a very ridicule and twisted joke right now.

[Deetwenty]

Haven't read all comments but to my mind the biggest issue is that Red-hat decided to significantly cut the live of CentOS 8 short, which means there is only a short amount of time to figure out if CentOS streams fits your needs and if not what the alternatives are. Combined this with the rather ham fisted way they are doubling down on this and this is rapidly turning into something of a PR disaster. If they had jus announced that CentOS 8 would be last CentOS release (with normal duration of support) and that after that everybody has to move to Streams, RHEL proper, or something else it would be a much smaller issue (still an issue of course but a lot easier to handle).

All in all before all this was considering CentOS as a base for my home-lab/-server (that is in the planning phase) but now will probably go with openSUSE leap or Ubuntu server

[duby229]

Unfortunately, that statement only applies in an ideal world. There are a lot of businesses and units out there that run CentOS _specifically_ because they cannot afford RHEL licenses but still need the compatibility due to industry reasons (and yes it's Linux, but not everything running on it is open source and rebuildable). For example, my current employer has been running CentOS for years now (after transitioning from Fedora Core), and a reason they're not using RHEL is that the former parent company would absolutely not give them the funding for it. It's a similar situation for people in areas like HPC or Academia, or different business units where they don't have a say in where funds are allocated.

With our new parent company we are investigating the ability to transition to RHEL (as a few other business units do use it, but another group just finished transitioning from RHEL to CentOS), but it's not a guarantee. And with how our funding is allocated, that could be a potential major hit to funding that could have otherwise been applied to hiring several people in key positions we are presently lacking (and from my teams perspective, desperately need).

We also don't really need the Red Hat support and do just fine on our own, but you aren't allowed to use the Self-Support licenses (which would save some money) in a production environment.

Cheers,
Mike

In that case you have every right to tell your employer fare-thee-well, Buh-Bye! If you're qualified for your job then you'll find another employer who is willing to pay for the support that -YOU- deserve.

[duby229]

Red Hat had toxic attitudes, but it's getting worse after IBM acquisition.

Red Hat must be made irrelevant. Others must put money to developers to the efforts they do, so their relevance becomes imperceptible.

GNOME monoculture and lack of true and reality strong desktop standards are extremely negative too. That must end ASAP.

I'm not biased to one DE/WE or another. In my opinion 100% of them sucks to a considerable degree for very different reasons, the lack of true and reality strong desktop standards is a major one.

FreeDesktop is a very ridicule and twisted joke right now.

Yeah, mooching off of a Redhat clone will -NEVER- accomplish that.... Never!

[computerquip]

Unfortunately, that statement only applies in an ideal world. There are a lot of businesses and units out there that run CentOS _specifically_ because they cannot afford RHEL licenses but still need the compatibility due to industry reasons (and yes it's Linux, but not everything running on it is open source and rebuildable). For example, my current employer has been running CentOS for years now (after transitioning from Fedora Core), and a reason they're not using RHEL is that the former parent company would absolutely not give them the funding for it. It's a similar situation for people in areas like HPC or Academia, or different business units where they don't have a say in where funds are allocated.

With our new parent company we are investigating the ability to transition to RHEL (as a few other business units do use it, but another group just finished transitioning from RHEL to CentOS), but it's not a guarantee. And with how our funding is allocated, that could be a potential major hit to funding that could have otherwise been applied to hiring several people in key positions we are presently lacking (and from my teams perspective, desperately need).

We also don't really need the Red Hat support and do just fine on our own, but you aren't allowed to use the Self-Support licenses (which would save some money) in a production environment.

Cheers,
Mike

From my perspective, it sounds like your parent company is being stingy, and you're taking it out on RHEL because they will no longer provide a free product that you don't have to worry about funding for. If you can afford industry average for engineers, you're talking less than 1/50 of the price you'd pay for a single employee per year, for a standard license.

I'm a bit confused why you want CentOS to begin with if I'm honest. It sounds like you're an ideal candidate for something like CentOS Stream.

[mroche]

From my perspective, it sounds like your parent company is being stingy, and you're taking it out on RHEL because they will no longer provide a free product that you don't have to worry about funding for. If you can afford industry average for engineers, you're talking less than 1/50 of the price you'd pay for a single employee per year, for a standard license.

I'm a bit confused why you want CentOS to begin with if I'm honest. It sounds like you're an ideal candidate for something like CentOS Stream.

I was using my employer as an example, but the concept of allocating funding is very much a real discussion and one where not everything can be afforded or deemed "important". We're also not an engineering company that produces a software product for customers. We consume products our vendors develop on RHEL, due to long standing industry history. There are very few companies in our industry that officially support anything besides RHEL, and CentOS through derivation (even though they're not supposed to work like that).

As for the cost of licensing, we have over 3x the number of systems as we do employees (40x if you limit that to just the "technical" folks, and much higher if you limit it further to just the Unix admins [there are 7 of us total]). Just going off MSRP from Red Hat's site, we'd be paying over a million dollars a year just for the operating system. With our new parent we definitely wouldn't be paying that price (and I know people at Red Hat that tell me that full price is never a thing in negotiated settings), but it would still be a substantial sum of money that'll be taken out of the budget for actual engineers to support the in-house things we do develop here or other critical staff. Unless of course the parent is willing to absorb those infra costs separately (and this year hasn't been fantastic for said company, having to shut down most of it's revenue streams, and we're still the 'new kid on the block'). Everything is give and take, and a balance needs to be struck. For most of the software stacks we use that have both paid enterprise options and free open source variants, we are using the free variants.

CentOS Stream might work out, but we won't know for sure until next year when Stream really comes into its own in a complete manner. And we've had instances in the past where a minor update of RHEL does bork our vendors applications in various ways (not all of which are immediately transparent like 'app won't launch') and would rather not have that thrown at us ahead of schedule. We're in a better boat than people actually on C8 though, we we're aiming for testing in February and looking at a 2022 deployment timeline. But whatever decision we make will likely be around the Q2->Q3 transition point.

And yes, former parent company was incredibly stingy about our unit. Treated as a money-maker without much reinvestment into the business (ala "just keep doing what you're doing").

Cheers,
Mike

[zxy_thf]

Haven't read all comments but to my mind the biggest issue is that Red-hat decided to significantly cut the live of CentOS 8 short, which means there is only a short amount of time to figure out if CentOS streams fits your needs and if not what the alternatives are. Combined this with the rather ham fisted way they are doubling down on this and this is rapidly turning into something of a PR disaster. If they had jus announced that CentOS 8 would be last CentOS release (with normal duration of support) and that after that everybody has to move to Streams, RHEL proper, or something else it would be a much smaller issue (still an issue of course but a lot easier to handle).

All in all before all this was considering CentOS as a base for my home-lab/-server (that is in the planning phase) but now will probably go with openSUSE leap or Ubuntu server

I started to feel like this move has not been reviewed by their marketing people.

If CentOS is marketed as Fedora LTS with 5 years life cycle, and RH silently uses it as upstream of RHEL. People will be happy and more willing to use it when Ubuntu LTS works.

[omer666]

Red Hat had toxic attitudes, but it's getting worse after IBM acquisition.

Red Hat must be made irrelevant. Others must put money to developers to the efforts they do, so their relevance becomes imperceptible.

GNOME monoculture and lack of true and reality strong desktop standards are extremely negative too. That must end ASAP.

I'm not biased to one DE/WE or another. In my opinion 100% of them sucks to a considerable degree for very different reasons, the lack of true and reality strong desktop standards is a major one.

FreeDesktop is a very ridicule and twisted joke right now.

Funny enough, using GNOME is a choice on my part. And I'm not a masochist, if it's what you think.
What is the best desktop environment then? Windows is completely broken and macOS hasn't seen an evolution of its own since 10.4