Red Hat Announces Free "RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure"

[mroche]

mppix All I am saying is that although the CentOS project will not be doing the "downstream" RHEL rebuilds, Red Hat is not going to be trying to interfere with other projects that wish to do so. This is stated in their FAQs, and what I have been personally told by members of the project in discussions about it.

As an elaboration, if you look at the kernel in git (https://git.centos.org/rpms/kernel/branches) you'll see the c8 (CentOS 8) and c8s (CentOS Stream 8) branches. Presently the CentOS team packages both for distribution to consumers, however at the end of this year the project will cease to package the c8 RPMs. However, the code commits for c8 will still be ongoing, so external rebuild projects can continue to rebuilt RHEL, it's part of their release architecture. I've been told the same will be the case for RHEL 9 as well, they will still be supplying the standard c9 branch, just not building the RPMs.

Granted, they won't offer explicit aid to those that wish to do so, obviously, but they will still be publishing the code in the necessary branches and the tools to retrieve it.

Cheers,
Mike

[mppix]

https://git.centos.org isn't going anywhere. And although the CentOS team themselves won't be building the "end result" RPMS and delivering them to folks because they'll be focused on Stream, that doesn't mean someone else can't. And having spoken to members of the CentOS project (actual contributors/board members), there is a lot of internal red tape at Red Hat that would need to be cut through for them to stop also marking/tagging the standard version number releases (i.e. the standard c7/c8 and upcoming c9 branches in git). So projects like Alma, Rocky, and OEL won't be going anywhere, there just won't be an officially unofficial directly supplied rebuild by those within Red Hat. That being said, let's see what happens circa May/RH Summit when CentOS Stream 9 comes out. I'm pretty sure the change to GitLab from Pagure is happening around then, though it may come later.

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike,
Are you suggesting that there may be a binary compatible CentOS version with proper support?
That would be awesome.
Thanks

[mroche]

I am the first to be baffled by the entire development. My best guess of Redhat's "embrace, extend, and destroy" tactics is that they will try to prevent binary compatible RHEL alternatives. This has been a move that both Canonical and MS would be proud of.

https://git.centos.org isn't going anywhere. And although the CentOS team themselves won't be building the "end result" RPMS and delivering them to folks because they'll be focused on Stream, that doesn't mean someone else can't. And having spoken to members of the CentOS project (actual contributors/board members), there is a lot of internal red tape at Red Hat that would need to be cut through for them to stop also marking/tagging the standard version number releases (i.e. the standard c7/c8 and upcoming c9 branches in git). So projects like Alma, Rocky, and OEL won't be going anywhere, there just won't be an officially unofficial directly supplied rebuild by those within Red Hat. That being said, let's see what happens circa May/RH Summit when CentOS Stream 9 comes out. I'm pretty sure the change to GitLab from Pagure is happening around then, though it may come later.

Cheers,
Mike

[mppix]

I am fairly baffled too. The child really doesn't make sense does he XD.
Why would Debian users be the ones whining? They seem to have made a better choice and are unaffected by this corporate monetisation nonsense.

Yeah, not sure what pal666 's comment is about. Redhat seems to be moving to a Debian model, where CentOS stream is essentially Debian testing and RHEL is Debian stable with the main difference that you pay a pretty dollar for RHEL..

I am the first to be baffled by the entire development. My best guess of Redhat's "embrace, extend, and destroy" tactics is that they will try to prevent binary compatible RHEL alternatives. This has been a move that both Canonical and MS would be proud of.

[kpedersen]

I'm confused. Are you trying to troll really hard? .. or did you eat a clown for breakfast?

I am fairly baffled too. The child really doesn't make sense does he XD.
Why would Debian users be the ones whining? They seem to have made a better choice and are unaffected by this corporate monetisation nonsense.

[mppix]

lol, you've basically proved my point: only debian users are whining

I'm confused. Are you trying to troll really hard? .. or did you eat a clown for breakfast?

[andyprough]

Long-time lurker, don't post much, thanks for making folks feel welcome. I ran it for some workloads in 2013-15 when we got the licenses for free with our Cisco UCS purchases. I didn't hate it, but it didn't blow my socks off as something I'd recommend my management team to pay for.

As a long-time lurker you probably know that Michael benchmarks opensuse fairly often and that there has been widespread respect here for their work on btrfs and their cloudy technologies. Nobody gives a crap about Novell agreeing to sell a few thousand M$ licenses 15 years ago. And I don't care whether you get your company to pay for SuSE licenses or not, there's no money in it for me. And you should feel very welcome here - feel free to keep bashing opensuse - every other distro gets bashed.

[bofkentucky]

Long-time lurker, don't post much, thanks for making folks feel welcome. I ran it for some workloads in 2013-15 when we got the licenses for free with our Cisco UCS purchases. I didn't hate it, but it didn't blow my socks off as something I'd recommend my management team to pay for.

[andyprough]

Many of us didn't like the stink they acquired when they were tied up with Novell, probably not fair to judge them on that today, but they probably lost their chance when they failed to capitalize on the Redhat -> RHEL conversion 18 years ago.

I like that the guy with 4 posts is telling us why no one uses SuSE or opensuse because of some bad feeling he had 15-20 years ago. He doesn't realize probably half of us or more have used SuSE or opensuse products within the past 5 years, and that it is well respected as a technology leader on Phoronix.

[mmmbop]

FYI for anyone looking for the CentOS Stream image on hub.docker.com, https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOSStream tells you to use:

docker pull quay.io/centos/centos:stream8