On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:52 PM Joshua Kramer <joskra42.list@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Hello All-
>
> 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.
>
> --JK
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
My first impression when I read the news was that some MBA had made the
decision and I decided to find out if there were Red Hat developers
Unemployed ... :-), which would give me light that it was a decision made
at the point of excel spreadsheets.
--
Victor
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
