Re: CentOS 8 Stream: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

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> Le 10/12/2020 à 00:51, Joshua Kramer a écrit :
>> After reading and digesting a ton of community chatter about the
>> recent CentOS announcement I've come to the conclusion that there's a
>> lot of good about this, but there are also a lot of concerns that are
>> being ignored.  And nobody so far has stared directly into the eyes of
>> the elephant in the room.  So here goes.
>>
>> The Good: From a technical perspective- both in the sense of "getting
>> newer software" and "technical community being more involved in
>> bugfixes, etc"- having *a version* of CentOS called "AppStream" is
>> fantastic. The various RedHat and CentOS folks who have been extolling
>> these virtues in blog posts and twitter feeds are right-on.  But from
>> responses I've seen, it appears to me that they think that these
>> virtues are enough to completely gloss over the complete and utter
>> clusterfrackas they've caused.
>>
>> The Bad: No point releases.  There is POSITIVELY NO* REASON that they
>> can't have AppSream and still do point releases.  Brand new stuff
>> would go into AppStream, at some point they do a point release of
>> RHEL, then follow the normal CentOS procedure to spin a CentOS build
>> of that point release.  This is already a tried and true process.  It
>> will cost RedHat all of what, low five digits (if that) in developer
>> salary to do this.  Heck I'm sure some volunteers would step up to use
>> the existing infrastructure if RedHat didn't want to spend any paid
>> developer time on this.
>>
>> The Ugly: I denoted "NO* REASON" above because there actually *are*
>> reasons that we are not privy to.
>> https://twitter.com/JoshuaPKr/status/1336744681716244480  Since RedHat
>> is not being transparent with this, we are forced to speculate and
>> remain bewildered at why they would make a decision that is going to
>> cost them so much in the long run.  The most common (and most likely)
>> theory is that some MBA somewhere in middle management saw all of this
>> CentOS being used in production environments (and otherwise downloaded
>> for free), and had the idea that if CentOS had its head cut off people
>> would just buy RHEL subscriptions.
>>
>> That may happen in a few cases, but for the most part, that is NOT
>> what is going to happen.  By handling the CentOS situation in this
>> way, RedHat has branded itself as a company that acts in bad faith. If
>> a company acts in bad faith towards a community where non-monetary
>> value is exchanged, WHY would you trust that company to hold up its
>> obligations for contracts that are actually paid?  People are going to
>> do whatever they can to get away from RedHat.  Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE
>> will all benefit from this.  Even in cases where non-profits and other
>> similar clients "contact RedHat about options because Stream won't
>> meet their needs"- why would such entities have ANY reason to trust
>> anything that RedHat says to them?
>>
>> There have been hundreds of other messages that describe exactly what
>> RedHat loses in this deal so I won't go into that here.  But branding
>> oneself as a "bad faith actor" is usually a terrible way to try to
>> pick up a little bit of subscription revenue.  In the end it's going
>> to be a losing scenario.  This is an absolutely UNMITIGATED DISASTER
>> from a marketing and community goodwill standpoint.
>>
>> It can, however, be mitigated if RedHat backtracks, admits their
>> mistake, and affirmatively commits to support future CentOS point
>> releases.  I'll be interested to see how this turns out.
>
> +1
>
> Spot on.
>
> Thank you for voicing all our concerns in such an articulate manner.
>
> https://twitter.com/microlinux_eu/status/1336765811860574209
>

Hi,

I can only second what has been said in all the posts to this list during
the past hours and days.

Still, I'd like to quickly express my view on the situation:

RedHat has made a BIG mistake, most likely the biggest in their history
and one can only wonder how this could happen. They have disappointed so
many people who were supporting them in what they did and were a driver of
their business by attracting customers to buy from RedHat.

To me it's clear that "the child has already fallen into the well". It's
like in a marriage, you know where the red line is and you don't cross it
- until you like to make insane decisions.

Right now I have not decided where to go next but I'm sad to realize that
there is one Open Source company less to trust in future. I'm not sure the
decision makers were really aware what they did to a large community of
promoters of their business but I guess it won't have a positive impact in
the long run.

Thanks to the CentOS team for all their hard work over all the years! You
really didn't deserve this to happen.

Kind regards,
Simon

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