On 12/14/20 10:54 AM, Yves Bellefeuille wrote:>
> The article states that CentOS will now be "upstream" of RHEL
instead
> of "downstream". This is strange to me. I never thought CentOS
was
> upstream or downstream of RHEL; I always thought it *was* RHEL --
> perhaps a little delayed, but that's not the same as being
"downstream".
CentOS has always been 'downstream' of RHEL.? The CentOS team rebuilt
the source packages with the goal of getting as close as possible to
what RHEL shipped, but it has never been 100% identical.? You can do the
same by pulling all of the package contents from git.centos.org and
build the sources in the correct order with the correct software and the
correct options to rpmbuild.? Building from git.centos.org is not really
hard at all; what is hard is figuring out the order and figuring out the
other bits you might need that aren't necessarily on git.centos.org.
Building from git is documented at
https://wiki.centos.org/Sources?highlight=(git.centos.org) and you can
look at an example of how I rebuilt a CentOS 8 RPM to get a
non-distributed subpackage rebuilt at
https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=73376&p=314200#p314200
CentOS has never *been* actual RHEL.
> It's also clear that Red Hat didn't understand the importance of
the
> 10-year support period.
If they didn't understand it, they wouldn't offer it for RHEL.? They
just believe that if you need that you should pay something for it. A
10-year support lifespan, even doing a straight rebuild of the packages
from RHEL, has a huge cost, and someone has to pay those costs. Should
Red Hat's paying customer base subsidize those costs? (if you say 'Red
Hat should pay for it' that actually means you think Red Hat's paying
customers should pay for it, because that's where Red Hat's money comes
from).? In the case of Oracle Linux, Oracle has decided that yes, their
paying support customers should subsidize the cost for those who aren't
paying.? Someone, somewhere, must pay the costs; in a volunteer project
the volunteers typically pay the labor cost themselves, and in many
cases pay the cost of the compute hardware, bandwidth, and electricity
required; these are not small costs, and someone, somewhere, must pay
them.? If the costs aren't adequately covered, the project's
deliverables suffer, and users complain.
It really just boils down to a cost without a tangible return on
investment.? It remains to be seen if the intangible ROI was as large as
the vocal reaction to the transition announcement would imply.