Red Hat Hires CentOS Developers 91
Posted
by
timothy
from the first-national-brain-trust-of-raleigh dept.
from the first-national-brain-trust-of-raleigh dept.
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."
Maybe (Score:2)
They could take over Solaris development too...
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Oracle would rather kill Solaris than let that happen.
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Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Oracle would rather kill Solaris than let that happen.
Good riddance... Solaris is nothing special or unique, at least these days. It's best feature was that it ran on Sparc based hardware, which when Sun Micro Systems was in it's heyday said "Rock Solid reliability". So if you wanted something to run for a decade or two, you purchased Sun hardware which locked you into Solaris. Now days, who cares about Solaris? Running Solaris on X86 hardware it is pointless because it buys you nothing in reliability while costing you in obscurity. Just go to a stable Linux distribution.
The ONLY reason you field Solaris now, is if your customer demands it or your legacy application is not easily ported. The one possible exception to this might be if you are putting up an Oracle cluster.
Solaris is going to die... It probably should too.
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Nah. Oracle would rather kill Solaris than let that happen.
Good riddance... Solaris is nothing special or unique, at least these days. It's best feature was that it ran on Sparc based hardware, which when Sun Micro Systems was in it's heyday said "Rock Solid reliability". So if you wanted something to run for a decade or two, you purchased Sun hardware which locked you into Solaris. Now days, who cares about Solaris? Running Solaris on X86 hardware it is pointless because it buys you nothing in reliability while costing you in obscurity. Just go to a stable Linux distribution.
The ONLY reason you field Solaris now, is if your customer demands it or your legacy application is not easily ported. The one possible exception to this might be if you are putting up an Oracle cluster.
Solaris is going to die... It probably should too.
Actually, Solaris had several good features. It had much better resource management than Linux does, and the introduction of Solaris Zones allowed a high-performance VM environment while minimizing the amount of gratuitous replication of resources. Basically, sort of a chroot jail + COW filesystem with service level controls.
Sadly, however, the Solaris admins where I worked were never trained to take advantage of those features, so eventially Solaris got booted in favor of lots of Linux and Windows boxes.
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Full disclosure... I've been a Solaris Admin, off and on for years who has only been briefly involved with using zones
The zones idea is roughly equivalent to chroot (or schroot in some use cases) on Linux. So if you like zones, you can do almost the same thing on a Linux box.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Solaris as an OS. The reality is that Solaris is going to die and go the way of SCO Unix. The sooner it dies, the better at this point.
Solaris zones (Score:3, Informative)
Full disclosure... I've been a Solaris Admin, off and on for years who has only been briefly involved with using zones
Your comments show this.
The zones idea is roughly equivalent to chroot (or schroot in some use cases) on Linux. So if you like zones, you can do almost the same thing on a Linux box.
No, it's not. Chroot is a (mostly) completely useless mechanism for security and isolation.
With zones, you can set up the zone with a completely different IP, with different firewall rules and even routing tables, and give some access to the root account on that zone, and not have to worry about them breaking out of the zone or affecting the hosting system (because you can put memory and CPU restrictions on the zone so it doesn't eat up system-wide resources). You can have dozens of
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Chroot is really a process thing that changes how that process sees the file system. It doesn't do anything to the file system. But, pretty much everything is file system based in Linux so everything under the parent process lives in the chroot jail. If you are careful and you use schroot, you can actually run two different distributions (with common kernel) in different processes. I've seen systems running multiple incompatible versions of libC from multiple distributions including multiple IP addresse
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Well, the example I gave was the network. Yes, chroot does help seperate groups processes (although it's important to understand the seperation is insecure by design, that is any root process can easily escape a chroot environment and have access to the main file system, which means you're limited in what types of process you can run if you want a chroot'd environment to be "secure"), but there do exist operating system functions that are not and never have been accessable via the filesystem.
The example
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Solaris does have three cool things going for it, and as it happens they are all three letter acronyms
FMA
SMF
ZFS
So in Linux land this translates into:
FMA - No equivalent
SMF - init scripts/systemd/upstart depending on your flavour of linux but none of which has the same functionality.
ZFS - BTRFS which is still in "beta" and doesn't support more advanced raid types?
So while the bulk of my house is LINUX based (even my kids PC's run it) our main media system is solaris.
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ZFS is the one thing that keeps Solaris on the map, as a modern enterprise filesystem/LVM is the one thing Linux sorely lacks. Even Windows offers Storage Spaces and ReFS, which can detect bit rot.
Then there is production level deduplication. ZFS does this actively, Windows does it with a background task that finds duplicated blocks. Linux has a few deduplication items, but none that would be considered production quality.
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Because Linux requires systemd and btrfs... yep.
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Re:Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
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(Sarcasm on) So YOU don't like LVM? Shudder shudder..
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Get a clue. The "extremely robust partitioning infrastructure" referred to has nothing to do with disk drive partitioning. I am confident GP is talking about Zones [wikipedia.org].
As for file systems, there is ZFS, and there are all the toy filesystems linux has. ZFS is actually much more than just a filesystem. LVM is an attempt to add on certain functionality missing from linux filesystems, but does not come close to providing everything ZFS has.
Yeah, adaptations of Solaris' breakthrough features have made their way to l
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Solaris was leading the pack, until Sun died, which was right about the time they went with the X86 port and shot themselves in the foot. Oracle buying them hasn't helped their prospects. Solaris is dying a slow and painful death.
Time to shoot the horse and stop beating it..
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But after a point, even Linux was available on SPARC, and that too not just Red Hat but pre-SCO Caldera, Debian and a few other distros. So if Solaris had nothing over Linux, then the latter should/would have replaced it everywhere that it was a better alternative. Like workstations in particular.
In reality, the selling point that Solaris has over Linux is that being proprietary, Oracle can charge anything for it, which wasn't how Sun did it. Incidentally, does Oracle provide Linux to anybody wanting t
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I suppose they would sell you that if you insisted. But I ask, why would you want to buy SPARC hardware then run Linux on it? Oracle sells X86 iron for their Linux customers. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet there is more profit margin in X86 systems than SPARC hardware (even if there is a significant premium for SPARC iron). Oracle is obviously still selling SPARC stuff, but I'm guessing they don't see enough profit to pay for the NRE to keep advancing the SPARC platform performance and it's pretty much
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I'm pretty sure that internal names of unreleased things can't be used as trademarks.
Re:Desktop Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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?
Not quite what I said. But if Google put their weight behind marketing a Linux OS at a time when people were unhappy with Microsoft's Vista and/or recently with Windows 8, yes I think Linux on the desktop could have taken off more so than it is now.
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.
You mean like ChromeOS, with Google search built in with Google apps throughout? Why not do the same with a full desktop OS?
And the third reason is that it would be too easy for third parties to strip off the Google bits
Android is open source, but not all of it. Google could easily market a Linux distro with some proprietary software integrated in, that mos
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It's called Windows XP. Don't want viruses? Install Chrome, they hear from their friends, and continue plugging away on what Microsoft won't support, but which runs fine for them. Plus it doesn't have to be associated with that 'Linux' that nobody ever heard of or be installed in what is usually a destructive way even when you know what an operating system is and to be careful.
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It's called Windows XP.
Support ends in 2 months, so good luck using after that. And it doesn't and hasn't helped when people are shopping for a new machine.
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Doesn't run well for a lot of people. Need 64-bit features? You're out of luck (and Windows XP x64 was horrible). Need to run new versions of Microsoft Office? You're out of luck. Windows Update? Hope you have hours for it to finish. Windows XP is old, and is showing its age. Similar argument can be applied to my G5 Power Mac running OS X 10.5 (Quad G5, 12GB RAM), my SGI Octane running IRIX 6.5, and my SunBlade 1500 running Solaris 10. For the PPC and Sparc, install Firefox (or Aurora on Mac, since
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They have, it is called Android.
Re:Desktop Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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?)
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Given that Redhat is now officially cooperating, I'm not entirely sure why CentOS is still relevant
At first glance, it wont be relevant real soon, and i bet wont exist must longer either.
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4. The enterprise are the people who actually want things fixed through service and support, while consumers tend to ditch hardware and software that's broken. My PC is one of a kind anyway, I don't care one bit about replacing any component with what is best and cheapest right now. If you did that in a company you'd quickly end up with hundreds of franken-PCs and a maintenance nightmare. Likewise, broken software is often an excuse to get around to upgrading or switching tools that you were kind of plannin
Because it's good business. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this matter to RedHat? The more people whose yardstick and gold standard is RedHat-related technology, the better; and ensuring all you can do on the derivative can be done exactly the same way on the commercial (down to the version of a command, the dot in a package name and the quirks of the brand) goes a long way to provide this promise.
How does this benefit RedHat if CentOS is given away for free? CentOS is RedHat's technology already in the hands of the client. But having the software is one thing - having access to support, formal enterprise training offerings, consultancy services and a dedicated rapid response for business-critical bugs is vital in business. Once the small company who could not afford RHEL becomes big, suddenly they are aware that they are on systems that RedHat knows perfectly, and migrating from CentOS to RHEL is painless - being systems different only at branding level. Migrating to anything else, even to SUSE Linux for Enterprise or Oracle's Linux (the latter being a part-clone of RHEL), becomes more involved. CentOS really now is RHEL.
Indeed, the good karma from being seen helping the community is peanuts compared to the advantage the offering of an easy transition and self-trained fans and already-committed users brings.
Re: (Score:2)
though they can't file bugs
Yes they can. RedHat will deal with the bugs in their own time, ie prioritise paying customers over anyone else.
they can log bugs? (Score:2)
I wonder if beta could allow for adding errata #justkidding #donthurtme
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TBH I've had a good amount of my bug reports die off as the reported-against OS release hits EOL... but you are still able to report them and sometimes you get fixes / attention.
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... though they can't file bugs or get a support hotline.
But they can file bugs with CentOS, which can then be upstreamed to the original authors so the bug gets taken care of. Yes, there is no formal support from the CentOS team, but I've been quite happy with the community support I've received the few times I've run into trouble.
My main use of CentOS has been for my mail server. It's still running CentOS 4; I'm working to build a new server with CentOS 6 when I have some spare cycles. That will upgrade both the OS and the hardware, the hardware getting a
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I'd like to see them start a real effort to come out with a competitive version of desktop Linux.
Red Hat's business model is giving away the server software and selling support. They seem to be doing pretty well with that. Fedora seems like a way to keep the door open if enough paying customers want to migrate their desktops to Linux but not a market they are pursuing today.
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Fedora is the test-bed. Users get Fedora for free, and RedHat gets a large audience trying the ideas/software out. I wouldn't certainly call it beta, but it's not "stable" like RHEL is considered to be.
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Huuh!?
Of course there is a great potential in making CentOS RedHat. Before, even for the not-so-large and not-so-small enterprise; it was - from the perspective of a non-slashdotter - something done by 'hackers'; by geeks and nerds, with a dubious licence, without funding (so it could collapse anytime).
Once your RedHat Linux Enterprise comes from RedHat, for free, though under a different name and with limitations, it makes much more sense as an entry system; something to start with, try it out, and be safe
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desktop linux isn't what made them a billion dollar company.
enterprise was, so .. yeah, I don't see the point in them making another ubuntu.
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wrong, those of us who used the Linux desktop in the late 90s brought it into the enterprise and worked to get it accepted.
RedHat very much became a success because of their desktop linux. Creating Federo, to be different from the Enterprise linux (which has restricted access) was a stab in the back to the userbase
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Hope this is what it seems (Score:3)
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am i oblivious to something other people can see or is RedHat Inc a genuinely sympathetic company? i am simply unable to find anyting this company has done that would be even remotely evil, unfair or greedy.
If you can't beat them... (Score:3)
Buy them! Or hire them like in this case..
I've always wondered what RH could do about CentOS. It was obvious that RH wasn't all that happy with CentOS, at least at first. With CentOS having to refer to "the up-line vender" and removing all the RH references and graphics it has always seemed to be the Red Headed step child.
So, does this mean RH has embraced the concept of CentOS, where "free is free" to download?
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Re:If you can't beat them... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Both Red Hat and CentOS benefit (Score:2)
Both of our hit and run ACs are completely fantasizing.
1) There aren't any CentOS "developers". CentOS is not "developed". It is just lifted verbatim (and entirely legally) from the Red Hat source code. The source code is edited where necessary strictly to remove Red Hat's corporate branding, and then just recompiled.
2) Kharanbir Singh a
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And it's lost on you why they can't update the kernel mid-release. For long term stability they have to keep the same kernel version. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, SGI, IBM, and plenty others have realized that too. When RHEL 7 comes out it will have a 3.x kernel. But RHEL 6 MUST keep the same kernel to avoid breakage.
Not all is lost... (Score:1)
Genious. Absolute genious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me take a second to applaud Red Hat for doing this.
This is why they own the Enterprise Linux market.
Their thinking, in a nutshell, is this:
Give the software (CentOS) to small companies.
Get kids right out of college using it to build their home servers.
Get everyone comfortable with CentOS/RHEL.
When it is time to buy, they will buy RH. Simple.
Here in NYC, Linux jobs are 99.99% RH/CentOS.
Because CentOS is free, anyone can download it and test
it. No disabled features, nothing. You want a job in Wall St?
Download CentOS, sit down and learn the thing and then
you WILL get a job! I guarantee it!
Microsoft, Oracle, Apple take note: This is how you own
a market. Not by squeezing every penny out of your
customers.
That's why Apple will never break into the Enterprise
market. This is why Microsoft has lost the Enterprise
market and this is how Oracle will fuck off and die soon
(hopefully).
Personally, I was a Slackware guy, for my home machines,
but CentOS has won me over. Now, it is the only thing I use.
One more thing: I work in Wall St. and I use RH/CentOS
every single day.
Red Hat, you guys rule. I salute you! Rock on!
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More accurate:
We really messed up by ditching the RedHat free edition and creating the bleeding edge Fedora distribution expecting it to satisfy everyone's needs.
We need to support the efforts of CentOS to keep the spirit of RedHat free edition alive.
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Whaaaat? Are you for real?
Apple is "not even trying" because they can't. They have:
No standard release dates.
No patch system worth a shit, everything runs from that stupid "System Update".
No enterprise level system tools (individual patch details), on and on...
They are worse that Windows. Much worse.
And as far as being "self-righteous", well, I can be that because I am right.
I know I'm being cynical... (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if RedHat did this to not only keep a community based RHEL afloat, but to also have direct access to the users in order to sale them the paid RHEL edition.
I wish continued success of CentOS but I've been burned by RedHat's "you need to pay for continued support to get updates or suffer through our brand new, very unstable (bleeding edge), and free Fedora distribution" tactic. I hope they aren't planning a similar fate for CentOS.
CONGRATS (Score:2)
to the CentOS team.
You deserve a vacation for your hard work...
Good. Did you enjoy it?
Now get back to work. :-)
Repeat (Score:2)
Note: this is basically the same story as http://linux.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] . The source is datelined February 10, 2014 , but starts "On Jan. 7, Karanbir Singh, project lead on CentOS, announced to his community that he and a handful of other core CentOS developers would now be employed full-time by Red Hat." (emphasis mine). The hiring isn't a new thing, it was announced at the time of the whole CentOS announcement (and actually happened, er, considerably earlier, AIUI).
Great news and support from Red Hat (Score:1)