Re: CentOS 8 future ("Long goodbye"?)

John Plemons <john@xxxxxxxxx> · Wed, 16 Dec 2020 12:14:00 -0500

I would like to echo the thanks in this post, and to add a bit of 
information that I have learned doing some quick research on where to 
go.  Scientific Linux is basically no more, they deferred to Centos and 
pretty much ended their distribution.
Oracle seems to be the easiest and quickest migration, they have a 
script which will make all of the changes to your server, switching you 
over to the Oracle flavor of Linux. On the horizon is Rocky Linux, a 
start up from the people who brought you Centos. As well as Cloud OS who 
says they are going to pick up where Centos left off, and continue a 
down stream version of the product. Worst case, we / you will have 
Oracle to fall back on if Rocky Linux or Cloud OS doesn't come through..
But once again, a BIG THANK YOU to Centos for all the years of work.

John Plemons

On 12/16/2020 11:45 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
My apologies about top posting.

I join Matthew on all counts.

The following might sound as a rant, but it is not, given the 
circumstances we have been put into.

First, and most important: thank you CentOS team for all great work 
youhave done during all these years. As user who used results of your 
work without giving much back (not counting maintaining public mirror, 
or helping others on the list whenever I felt my expertise adequate), 
I can not express how high I value what you gave to all of us.

Now, that CentOS as we knew it (as a “binary replica” of RedHat 
Enterprise) ceases to exist many of us are trying to figure out new 
long term solution for their “enterprise” sort of systems. Luckily I 
only partly have to do that, as for servers I already didmigration 
quite long ago. My mentioning it on this list was causing 
moreannoyance than I would like to, so I stopped mentioning it. But 
now it is time to mention it again, just to help everyone arrive at 
best decision. But first some thoughts on migration to different Linux 
Distro:

One of obvious possibilities is to migrate to some other “binary 
clone” of RHEL. One can find several, Oracle Linux (even thoughmany 
are cautious of Oracle, they - Oracle - didn’t drown out ofexistence 
mysql so far, maybe thanks to mariadb fork existence, …), Scientific 
Linux (which is effort of really small team, and I evaluated it well 
below CentOS when I had to make decision, and it confirmed trueover 
time), and others... However, once RedHat (or rather its owner 
IBM)made fundamental decision, it is not as much about the one who 
clones (binary rebuilds) of RHEL, as it is about RHEL itself. At least 
fo me it is. As, by undermining trust, even if they roll everything 
back to what it was, the trust is already lost by the knowledge of 
everyone that any moment they can do that in a future. This 
alternative is just out of question for me. Will I maintain RHEL for 
my current or potential future employer? Yes, definitely. Will I 
recommend fair (and way cheaper, better, longer lasting) alternative? 
By all means, yes, and with my experience of migration, and documented 
migration steps, etc...

Another possibility for pure Linux folks is switch to different 
distro.Not with 10 years life cycle (here RedHat was unique), but 
shorter one, yet with much easier upgrade from one release to another. 
[Even knowing about Ubuntu LTS] Debian would be my choice, which I am 
going to pursue for CentOS number crunchers and workstations I 
maintain. Laptops are Debianclone Ubuntu since long ago. This will be 
“rolling release", i.e. mostly you will have to upgrade packages to 
latest release, and constantly will take chance something will break 
with change of internals of given software from one release to 
another. It will be more work (for 24/7/365 servers most gravely 
notable). But it may outweigh the single event when your “enterprise” 
life is cancelled one day, and youhave to redo the whole 
infrastructure all at once. Think about it and about peace of mind 
avoiding that eventuality.

This leads me at last to telling that my sever infrastructure was 
migrated long ago to FreeBSD. One can chose different BSD successor 
based on one’s own assessment of suitability. First of all, pure Linux 
folk, it is not that challenging as one may think. I would say here 
the same thing I was telling to my users who we just starting to use 
UNIX (or Linux). How many command do you need to know to start using 
UNIX? Just 5-6 isenough. Start doing things, and in a couple of Months 
you will feel you know everything. In 6 Months you will be top expert: 
the one who knows what he knows and knows what he doesn’t know. My 
choice was based on the following facts: FreeBSD is most widely used 
(even Microsoft was once noticed to run some of their servers on 
FreeBSD). FreeBSD has excellent documentation. FreeBSD community is as 
eager to help the one who got stuck with something as our CentOS 
community is. They have as excellent experts as Johnny, Matthew, ... 
sorry I can not mention everyone, that will take separate huge post...

And now, with my servers gone to FreeBSD long ago, I can share this 
nice experience. On FreeBSD (base system is separate, and Linux, BTW, 
decided to go same excellent way), and extra stuff can be added from 
huge port collection, most part of which is available as binary 
packages. Ports/packages are up to their maintainers, and pretty much 
all of the ones I use are available as different versions, still 
maintained and patched, so younot necessarily have to upgrade to 
latest version when it is released. In this respect, individual ports 
or packages can live as “enterprise” portions of your ecosystem 
themselves (each with its own life cycle, still…) This actually is not 
as challenging as it may sound, as long before end of life of some 
package version (like PHP-5), at every update you will get warning 
that it will be end of life soon (starts multiple Months before the 
day it is going to happen…).

Anyway, what I am leading to is: life with FreeBSD is not as 
challenging as it may seem before you try. Just try it. And it is more 
“enterprisish” than with Linux “rolling release” in my opinion. Though 
I must confess, I have much less “rolling” Linux release server 
experience, than I have FreeBSD experience.

I did not even mention FreeBSD jails which essentially are containers 
with the same base system mounted read-only (or you can several base 
system versions, e.g. 12.x and 11.x for some or another jails). 
Anyway, jails can be long separate post…

The length of my post suggests that it is a “log goodbye”which it 
probably will be.

Thanks again to CentOS, the hard working excellent team. Whatever 
fallson you from us has nothing to do with you, but rather with 
RHEL/IBM, andthe trust they decided to throw out of window.

Valeri

On Dec 15, 2020, at 7:04 PM, Phelps, Matthew 
<mphelps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 7:41 PM Johnny Hughes <johnny@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 12/15/20 6:12 PM, Joshua Kramer wrote:
I don't think there will be a course change either, but for different
reasons. The motivation isn't "cashing/selling out". It's... actually
the
stated motivation
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q2
First, I will note that I think the idea of creating *a version of*
CentOS that is called "Stream", with the intent that it leads RHEL by
a bit, is a GREAT idea, for exactly the stated reasons!

There's one problem I have with this asserted motivation. Stream is
not being done as *a version of* CentOS. It is being done as *THE*
CentOS, which means you're discontinuing point releases. As far as
"maintaining CentOS point releases to follow RHEL"- this is what is
being discontinued. How much money, in developer time and other
incidentals, does this cost RedHat per year? Of course this is a
proprietary number. But let's imagine that this number is $250k per
year. Out of what was it, about $433M of profit (2019)? So it would
cost RedHat 0.06% of profit to hire more developers to keep issuing
CentOS point releases.

What does RedHat "buy" in return for spending 0.06% of its profit on
maintaining point releases?
-Community trust and goodwill. Those members of the community that
cannot afford RedHat licenses for whatever reason still know that the
#1 player in the Linux marketplace still has their back. Then when
those folks move on to enterprises that can afford RH licensing (and
in some cases demand it), will select RedHat because of this trust and
goodwill. They will be highly likely to recommend other RedHat
products- since it all "works together" and they'll know RHEL (i.e.
CentOS) well. Also note that this trust and goodwill means
"convenience", even within enterprises that have a large budget with
RedHat. If I have a project and I want to spin up 100 OS instances
just for the heck of it, I can. I don't need to ask anyone, I don't
need to reserve or download any entitlement key files. I don't need
to debug weird problems when entitlement key files don't work.
-Control of part of the ecosystem. Those companies that build their
products to run on RHEL (or in RHEL containers) are able to (and
encouraged to) certify those products on RHEL because they are able to
use CentOS.

But more to the point, what does RedHat LOSE by saving 0.06% of its
profit? The damage to community trust and goodwill far exceeds the
gains that would be realized if the status quo were kept in place.
Yes, it's true that many of the folks who used CentOS would never turn
into paying customers. But due to this situation, you have thousands
of system administrators who are actively looking to completely
abandon the RedHat ecosystem altogether. When it comes time to
recommend products... they aren't going to recommend RHEL. They
aren't going to recommend JBoss, or Fuse, or 3Scale API management.
It's clear that RedHat can't be trusted with some parts of its
portfolio, so why should we trust ANY of its products?
So don't trust them. Move to something else if you think something is
better.

If it is 100% factually correct that the ONLY motivation for killing
point releases is the stated motivation, then it's just a simple
matter of finding a spare $250k (or whatever that cost is) from the
almost-half-a-billion dollar corporate coin purse. The return on
investment has been, and will continue to be, immeasurable...
$250K is not even close. That is one employee, when you also take into
account unemployment insurance, HR, medical insurance etc. now multiply
that by 8. Now, outfit those 8 employees to work from home .. all over
the world, different countries, different laws.

.. THEN buy 30 machines minimum (servers, not workstations) for
building and testing, buy a service contract for those 30 machines, host
the bandwidth required to sync out to 600 worldwide servers.

We need all the CI machines .. that is a bunch of blade servers for
that. They need service contacts too.

In any event it doesn't matter. The decision is made. If people don't
want to use CentOS Stream, then don't. The decision is not changing.
_______________________________________________

We won't.

Thanks for all your work in the past. Good luck to you.

And to Red Hat I have one more thing to say:

Buh bye!

###

--
*Matt Phelps*

*Information Technology Specialist, Systems Administrator*

(Computation Facility, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

60 Garden Street | MS 39 | Cambridge, MA 02138
email: mphelps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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