Red Hat Hires CentOS Developers

rjmarvin writes "Karanbir Singh and a handful of other CentOS developers are now full-time Red Hat employees, working in-house on the CentOS distribution with more transparent processes and methods. None of the CentOS developers will be working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The CentOS project would become another distribution and community cared for by Red Hat, like Fedora, and Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens says the company is planning its future around OpenStack, not just Linux."

Re:Desktop Linux

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that Redhat is now officially cooperating, I'm not entirely sure why CentOS is still relevant(rather than 'Redhat, RTFM Edition, upgradeable at any time to Redhat, Comes with Support Edition if you buy support'); but I assume that Redhat is focused on the enterprise for a few reasons:

1. Enterprise is where MS, and any other remaining competitors, really turn the screws on pricing. MS doesn't give away Windows Home editions; but only the OEMs know how much those costs, and most buyers aren't considering DIY or buying a 'bare' PC, so the effective cost (among the options they have) is zero. Enterprises, Not. So. Much. MS charges considerably more for 'Pro', and more again for anything server.

2. Enterprises have volume and techies. A home user has, maybe, the nerd kid down the street or something for tech support. They also have a small number of computers. Even a relatively high price, per computer, makes total sense if it avoids any support headaches, and allows those that do come up to be handled by the most common tech support people. Enterprises, though, have enough computers that buying techs rather than 'solutions' starts to become cost effective(plus, their requirements tend to be complex enough that 'solutions' still require techs)

3. 'Desktop'(in the sense of 'consumer') is where a lot of the really nasty hardware churn is. 'Enterprise desktop', 'workstation', and 'server' are all areas where (even if running Windows) IT departments Do. Not. Want. lots of driver/hardware churn, don't want to spend lots of time re-validating configurations, don't want shitty beta drivers, and so on. They are also often satisfied with a smaller variety of hardware, and from vendors who are more likely to build drivers with server and workstation customers in mind. Consumer OS that doesn't support a shitty inkjet released two years after the OS was? Pissed off consumer. Enterprise? Well, we've got some printers that all support Postscript or PCL, a bunch of servers that need NIC and SAS HBA support, and maybe some workstations with fancy graphics cards.

(As for Google and consumer Linux, it's a matter of taste whether you say that they already have, or that they never will: Android and ChromeOS are both Linux-based, neither have more than the slightest relationship to traditional linux/unix userlands. Is Google throwing its weight behind consumer Linux, or using embedded Linux as a cheap and easy way to boot a Google userland?)

Re:If you can't beat them...

[Peter H.S.]

That CentOS must remove all traces of Red Hat branding is due to trademarks and what not. Not really a problem to do for any serious distro anyway. Red Hat has apparently been quite happy with CentOS for quite a while, since it generates new costumers and people knowing RHEL-like environments and developers too.

The corporate motive for getting directly involved in CentOS isn't trying to control a free edition of RHEL (there are many others besides CentOS), but is much more likely to be directed against Oracle who allegedly uses CentOS as Upstream for their Linux distro. Oracle haven't been smart enough to actually employ CentOS developers en masse, but with this move Red Hat can keep Oracle out of a controlling position in CentOS.

Red Hats direct involvement in CentOS has many benefits for its users; The steering and participation in CentOS have been opened up (it was a small, rather closed group before). The concept of "variants" seems most promising, since it allows people to work on CentOS variants without the need to actually fork away and become their own little distro island. So Sci-Linux are contemplating becoming a CentOS Variant so they can work on the software they care about, instead of all the extra work there is in maintaining your own distro.

Re:Desktop Linux

[Kjella]

Really, you think Google could have just slapped their name on it and all the reason Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop would go away? The other part is that Google isn't very interested in giving you a local solution, that doesn't give them any data nor a hook to google services. And the third reason is that it would be too easy for third parties to strip off the Google bits, despite Android being open source they have very strong incentives to keep OEMs from shipping "bare" phones without all the Google services, the Play store and so on which they wouldn't have for a Linux distro.

Re:Maybe

[saleenS281]

Nothing except ZFS, DTrace, crossbow, a fully featured SCSI target stack, and on solaris an extremely robust partitioning infrastructure. Here we are 9 years later and Linux still doesn't have a good answer.