RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version
This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).
CentOS Stream is not, in any way, a beta. The only outward evidence that it is, is that it gets packages earlier than RHEL because it doesn't need to wait for a minor release to introduce new features, the way that semantic versioning would require. But if getting packages first makes a distribution "beta", then RHEL was the beta for CentOS.
This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).
Well, considering RHEL beta is now stated to be a snapshot of Stream that will then undergo validation under the name 'beta', then absolutely Stream is, by RedHat's standards, beta. Now I have seen a RedHat person declare that Stream is equivalent in quality to Ubuntu LTS, and that's a tough thing to quantify, but notably Canonical is willing to stand up and provide commercial support for LTS, meanwhile RedHat is not willing to provide commercial support for Stream, so at least on that front it seems that Canonical has more confidence in LTS than RedHat does in Stream. Beta is a judgement call, but RedHat themselves 'graduates' Stream to 'Beta', so it's hard to both aspire to RedHat and not see the flow from Stream to beta.
I'll also say for a lot of commercial third party hardware and software vendors, they point blank will not support Stream, so even if it were true that RedHat did everything for Stream that they did for it as it becomes RHEL, it wouldn't be true that it receives the third party commercial attention. In fact, I would say most uses of CentOS I have historically seen have been to be matched to a vendor supporting RHEL. Without that coupling, might as well go with some other more up to date distribution, like Ubuntu, or a more compatible distribution like Oracle, Alma or, presumably eventually, Rocky.
I'll be amazed if Alma or Rocky Linux last 5 years. CentOS Stream is set to be better than CentOS ever was. Rebuilding RHEL is a tremendous amount of work, for very little benefit. Stream is a better option for nearly all purposes.
You could have made the same call about the RHEL clones back when Fedora Core/RHEL split happened, but CentOS persisted as a clone for 15 years until RedHat took control of the project and shuttered it, and within two months of that there was a beta of Alma out. There's an enduring interest in keeping any major participant in the Linux ecosystem true to the 'freely usable' roots that have mattered a lot. It may be the case one of them folds, but the whole 'let CentOS take care of it' resulted in that being shuttered, so I suspect their may be more aversion to allowing that to pass again. The scenarios that I could see as killing off Alma/Rocky would be for RHEL to go Oracle/Canonical-like in having free and no-registration access to installation and yum repositories, which would obviate the need to 'clone', or for RHEL to close up all their BSD and BSD-like licensed packages to make it impractical to aim for a compatible distribution anymore.
The scenarios that I could see as killing off Alma/Rocky would be... for RHEL to close up all their BSD and BSD-like licensed packages to make it impractical to aim for a compatible distribution anymore.
If that were to ever happen, it would be the end of RedHat. If you think that the whole CentOS was a debacle, just imagine the fallout from RHEL going closed-source!
I would also think so, however I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.
They think they are still doing the community a huge favor by even allowing Stream to happen, and lamented how Rocky and Alma were going to be wasting their time cloning instead of working on Stream. Also that they are hugely generous for merely re
I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.
Well, the current CEO of RH is the very person who championed the subscription model, so that doesn't surprise me. However, I think many of the RH engineers who are kernel developers are huge open source advocates and so, I think there would be a LOT of fallout (and RH management doesn't seem all that great at gauging fallout, IMO).
In any problem, if you find yourself doing an infinite amount of work,
the answer may be obtained by inspection.
CentOS Stream is not a beta (Score:2)
RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version
This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).
CentOS Stream is not, in any way, a beta. The only outward evidence that it is, is that it gets packages earlier than RHEL because it doesn't need to wait for a minor release to introduce new features, the way that semantic versioning would require. But if getting packages first makes a distribution "beta", then RHEL was the beta for CentOS.
That sounds silly, doesn't
Re:CentOS Stream is not a beta (Score:2)
This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).
Well, considering RHEL beta is now stated to be a snapshot of Stream that will then undergo validation under the name 'beta', then absolutely Stream is, by RedHat's standards, beta. Now I have seen a RedHat person declare that Stream is equivalent in quality to Ubuntu LTS, and that's a tough thing to quantify, but notably Canonical is willing to stand up and provide commercial support for LTS, meanwhile RedHat is not willing to provide commercial support for Stream, so at least on that front it seems that Canonical has more confidence in LTS than RedHat does in Stream. Beta is a judgement call, but RedHat themselves 'graduates' Stream to 'Beta', so it's hard to both aspire to RedHat and not see the flow from Stream to beta.
I'll also say for a lot of commercial third party hardware and software vendors, they point blank will not support Stream, so even if it were true that RedHat did everything for Stream that they did for it as it becomes RHEL, it wouldn't be true that it receives the third party commercial attention. In fact, I would say most uses of CentOS I have historically seen have been to be matched to a vendor supporting RHEL. Without that coupling, might as well go with some other more up to date distribution, like Ubuntu, or a more compatible distribution like Oracle, Alma or, presumably eventually, Rocky.
I'll be amazed if Alma or Rocky Linux last 5 years. CentOS Stream is set to be better than CentOS ever was. Rebuilding RHEL is a tremendous amount of work, for very little benefit. Stream is a better option for nearly all purposes.
You could have made the same call about the RHEL clones back when Fedora Core/RHEL split happened, but CentOS persisted as a clone for 15 years until RedHat took control of the project and shuttered it, and within two months of that there was a beta of Alma out. There's an enduring interest in keeping any major participant in the Linux ecosystem true to the 'freely usable' roots that have mattered a lot. It may be the case one of them folds, but the whole 'let CentOS take care of it' resulted in that being shuttered, so I suspect their may be more aversion to allowing that to pass again. The scenarios that I could see as killing off Alma/Rocky would be for RHEL to go Oracle/Canonical-like in having free and no-registration access to installation and yum repositories, which would obviate the need to 'clone', or for RHEL to close up all their BSD and BSD-like licensed packages to make it impractical to aim for a compatible distribution anymore.
Re: (Score:1)
The scenarios that I could see as killing off Alma/Rocky would be ... for RHEL to close up all their BSD and BSD-like licensed packages to make it impractical to aim for a compatible distribution anymore.
If that were to ever happen, it would be the end of RedHat. If you think that the whole CentOS was a debacle, just imagine the fallout from RHEL going closed-source!
Re: (Score:2)
I would also think so, however I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.
They think they are still doing the community a huge favor by even allowing Stream to happen, and lamented how Rocky and Alma were going to be wasting their time cloning instead of working on Stream. Also that they are hugely generous for merely re
Re: (Score:1)
I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.
Well, the current CEO of RH is the very person who championed the subscription model, so that doesn't surprise me. However, I think many of the RH engineers who are kernel developers are huge open source advocates and so, I think there would be a LOT of fallout (and RH management doesn't seem all that great at gauging fallout, IMO).