Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources To CentOS Stream

[lateo]

Would you run a server on Centos Stream?

Depends on needs and use case.
We switched some servers from Cent to Fedora after deciding that Fedora would in fact fit our needs better than Stream.
Still using Debian for something like 70% of our linux servers BTW.

[evasb]

Would you run a server on Centos Stream?

Depending of the server, yes. CentOS Stream is not "unstable" it is just brings another way to update the packages. If the packages are done and tested they are released in the stream of updates and RHEL will receive the same updates but in a different manner within minor releases. So, you will receive most updates just ahead of RHEL but these packages can't be at all described as "unstable" or even "new".

The problem of CentOS Stream is not its stability, it is that is not bug for bug compatible with RHEL. It is a distro that is very, very, close to RHEL but it is not RHEL exactly.

[mSparks]

The problem of CentOS Stream is not its stability, it is that is not bug for bug compatible with RHEL. It is a distro that is very, very, close to RHEL but it is not RHEL exactly.

The problem with centos stream is the same problem as fedora.

You have to update glibc on a fairly short timespan, which is a major pita for anything other than managing a very small number of servers.

It's just not as good a distribution as Fedora, for various reasons.

Absolutely no one is fooled by IBM trying to pretend CentOS Stream is in any way equivalent to the old CentOS distributions.

[qarium]

The problem with centos stream is the same problem as fedora.
You have to update glibc on a fairly short timespan, which is a major pita for anything other than managing a very small number of servers.
It's just not as good a distribution as Fedora, for various reasons.
Absolutely no one is fooled by IBM trying to pretend CentOS Stream is in any way equivalent to the old CentOS distributions.

they want us as beta testers on fedora or centos stream... but they only make money on long support time span like 10 years...

for a company like IBM/RedHat this is how they make money... if you don't like it do not use it..

"Absolutely no one is fooled by IBM trying to pretend"

i think they do not even try to fool us they just make clear if you want long support time span you have to pay.

[Daktyl198]

This is the same company that controls the entire Gnome project, as well as other core projects to a usable Linux desktop. I think they've proven time and time and time again that they don't care about the community, and yet people are still shocked when they do yet another thing to prove it. They use Linux purely because it's free for them to resell, not because they like Linux.

[Democrab]

Red Hat’s contribution back to all those projects has been extremely high.

Your contribution has been… ?

Yes but at least they contribute to open source and help the community.

What do you do besides download free binaries? Nothing?

I won't go right into why the "you just download binaries for free!" argument is a complete non-starter for a whole shipping container full of reasons provided you think about it for more than 5 seconds but here's one aspect you've failed to remember: Participating within the OSS community via places such as these forums or the *nix focused subreddits and fediverses or social media or whatever other options, providing help for end-users asking for help, writing guides even on how to do "unimportant" stuff like modding Windows-only games under wine, contributing to places such as winedb and protondb or even just adding games to Lutris, submitting or contributing to bug reports and countless other means are all various ways that people contribute back to the OSS ecosystem without ever writing a single line of code or even understanding how to code.

While I get that there are a lot of people who don't really participate very much if at all in the development side of things, maintaining a software ecosystem whether it's open source or closed source involves much more than just developing the code for it and trying to refute complaints about these kinds of changes with "but what about your contributions?" is just like when people try to make out that everyone complaining about DRM is simply a filthy pirate who doesn't want to pay for content, it's merely argumentum ad hominem rather than a valid argument in both cases.

[mSparks]

i think they do not even try to fool us they just make clear if you want long support time span you have to pay.

Then why kill off the centos project but not the centos brand?

Thats what I mean by "trying to fool".
There is nothing left of centos in centos stream, yet they want to pretend there is.

now they want to pretend RH linux isnt open source, and expect that to go any other way than it has in the past (see sunOS)

Its almost like they want to hand all their customers to Oracle, but I suspect they have just been hiring white collars from the microsoft sphere.

[skeevy420]

Then why kill off the centos project but not the centos brand?

Thats what I mean by "trying to fool".
There is nothing left of centos in centos stream, yet they want to pretend there is.

now they want to pretend RH linux isnt open source, and expect that to go any other way than it has in the past (see sunOS)

Its almost like they want to hand all their customers to Oracle, but I suspect they have just been hiring white collars from the microsoft sphere.

It's called a rebrand and they repositioned CentOS in-between Fedora and RHEL. Their corporate customers love CentOS Stream. It gives them a place to use as a testing ground that isn't the Wild West Fedora or the stale RHEL. They call it Stream because things trickle down from Fedora to Red Hat.

What they're doing is handing all of Rocky's and Alma's customer's to OpenSUSE. The only use of Rocky and Alma is to use RHEL for free for a business because RHEL offers it for free (requires registration) for a single user. If they can't get a free multi-user enterprise OS from RHEL or a RHEL clone, the most logical place to go is to SUSE and OpenSUSE since SUSE offers paid and free editions of their OS and they use RPMs.

Oracle is in the same boat as Rocky and Alma. They lost access, too. It'll be interesting to see what they do. Pay up or do something else. If I were them I'd pivot the upstream work into a CentOS SIG and offer the completed work as a custom repository that's added to RHEL and pinned for higher priority.

[eroux]

The only people who are pissed off at this are those who wanted to freeload off RHEL without paying a cent.

Now, as someone who is not only pretty much a career RHCE but also happens to work for a corporate who pretty much uses RHEL exclusively I have to respectfully disagree. This is a massively bad move.

This will cost IBM a ton of money in the long run when they lose the young SysAmins that came in via CentOS and later Rocky/Alma that will now rather just use Ubuntu (already a challenge we're facing) and Amazon Linux. Just like they screwed up with AIX in the past.

A lesson most Tech companies seem to learn and then forget: you have to get them when they're young.
A hint: young ones are poor...

[mSparks]

Oracle is in the same boat as Rocky and Alma. They lost access

No, No they didn't, because the kernel is GPL licenced, they were never using Red Hat builds anyway
https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/uek/
The only "lost access" here is any developer ever testing their stuff for red hat distribtions ever again