CentOS - Dec 2020 - CentOS 8 future

Johnny,

You have been involved in CentOS for a long time.? Would you mind 
explaining the structure here.? Do you work for Red hat full time on the 
CentOS team?? How many people are on that Team that were working on 
CentOS?? Is CentOS structured as a non-profit company with staff just 
working on development of this distribution or is this just a group of 
independent developers working on the same project?? How many people are 
working on active development of on the Red hat team / CentOS 
Organization (if any)?

Thanks for your time.

Chris


On 12/18/2020 10:28 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> On 12/17/20 7:54 PM, Konstantin Boyandin via CentOS wrote:
>> On 16.12.2020 22:50, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>> On 12/15/20 9:59 PM, Joshua Kramer wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 7:41 PM Johnny Hughes <johnny at
centos.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> $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.
>>>> I'm genuinely curious about something, and this is mostly
academic
>>>> since it's probably the subject of proprietary discussions
within
>>>> RedHat.  Presumably, RedHat had a build pipeline for RHEL that
worked
>>>> well for them, by supplying alpha/beta releases of point
releases to
>>>> their customers and giving them time to "cook" before
releasing those
>>>> point releases into production.  Why would RedHat invest
millions more
>>>> in buying the CentOS process just to have CentOS act as the
beta?
>>> Why did they change the development process of RHEL ..
>>>
>>> Because they want to do the development in the community.  The
current
>>> process of RHEL development is closed .. they want it to be open. 
It is
>>> that simple.
>>>
>>> I think Stream is also very usable as a distro.  I think it will be
just
>>> as usable as CentOS Linux is now.
>> It's usable, as Fedora is certainly usable - in its separate use
cases.
>> It's not bug-for-bug copy of current RHEL, so it's *not* as
usable as
>> CentOS Linux was.
>>
>>> It is not a beta .. I keep saying that.  Before a .0 release (the
main,
>>> or first, main reelase) is a beta.  Point releases do not really
need
>>> betas .. certainly not open to anyone other than customers.  Now
CentOS
>>> Stream is available all the time to everyone, customer or not. 
Once the
>>> full infrastructure is in place, everyone (not just RHEL customers)
can
>>> provide feed back and bugs, do pull requests, etc.
>> Now please tell me whether Chris Wright was lying when saying the below
>> to ZDNet:
>>
>> "To be exact, CentOS Stream is an upstream development platform
for
>> ecosystem developers. It will be updated several times a day. This is
>> not a production operating system. It's purely a developer's
distro."
>>
>> It's purely a developer's distro. Shall I explain difference
between a
>> developer's distro and the one suitable for production servers (a
>> rhetoric question)?
>>
> Of course he wasn't lying.  The purpose of ANY CentOS release from a
Red
> Hat perspective, is as a developer release.  Red Hat has never produced
> CentOS to be used in production for any reason.
>
> It is ALSO completely free to use however YOU want to use it.  As is
> CentOS Stream.  If it meets your requirements, you can use it.  Stream
> is no different.
>
> People who certify things, who certified CentOS Linux for things, are
> free to evaluate and do that with CentOS Stream as well.
>
> Is it ever going to be like it was before .. no.  If that is a deal
> breaker for you, OK.  Then you can't use CentOS any longer.  Great, if
> you can't use it, then use something else.
>
> All I can do is what I can do .. All you can do is what you can do.
> What is absolutely not helpful is continued complaining.  A decision
> was made. It is implemented. CentOS Stream is CentOS Stream.
>
> If you never want to use CentOS again .. great, don't use it.  I
can't
> make people use CentOS if they don't want to.
>
> What I will do is what I have been doing for the last 17 years .. I will
> do the best job I can to make the things I can build for any version of
> CentOS Linux (or Stream) the best they can be.  If people can use them,
> OK.  If they can't OK.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
-- 
Christopher Wensink
IS Administrator
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1339 Continental Drive
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Office:  715-831-1682
Mobile:  715-563-3112
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www.five-star-plastics.com

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 10:36:12AM -0600, Christopher Wensink
wrote:
> You have been involved in CentOS for a long time.? Would you mind
> explaining the structure here.? Do you work for Red hat full time on
> the CentOS team?? How many people are on that Team that were working
> on CentOS?? Is CentOS structured as a non-profit company with staff
> just working on development of this distribution or is this just a
> group of independent developers working on the same project?? How
> many people are working on active development of on the Red hat team
> / CentOS Organization (if any)?
Johnny can answer this too (and I'll let him cover the specifics about his
own employment) but since I'm here:

Like Fedora, there is no formal legal structure around CentOS as a project.
"A group of developers and stakeholders" is a reasonable description.
Red
Hat is the primary sponsor of both projects, and holds the trademarks and
other intellectual property ? and takes most legal responsibility and risk.
Red Hat also funds engineering, hardware, and a community budget.

There is no dedicated CentOS team at Red Hat, just as there is no dedicated
Fedora team. There are two highly-relevant teams, though. The first is
Community Platform Engineering, which serves infrastructure and
build tooling for both projects. Second is the Open Source Program Office,
which has a team of community managers and leaders. (Rich Bowen and Marie
Nordin fit in there.) Others are employeed other places ? Ben Cotton, who
serves as Program Manager for both Fedora and CentOS Stream ? comes to us
from the program management office.

There is no one at Red Hat whose individual job is "develop Fedora".
Instead, like non-RH community members, lots of different people across Red
Hat engineering have "maintain my package in Fedora" as part of their
job,
or "work on the Fedora Workstation as a whole". Those people are
usually
also responsible for something similar in RHEL.

This is true for RDO for OpenStack or OKD for OpenShift, too. And I'd have
to check for sure but I assume it is also the case for AWX for Ansible.

So, CentOS Linux is something kind of an aberration, because RH was paying
people in the CPE team to spend their time on package builds, even though
they weren't building those packages for RHEL. That's the thing Red Hat
wants to stop doing. With Stream, packages will be actually built by the
engineers who are building them for RHEL. People working on CentOS Stream
_project_ engineering will be more like the way CPE works for Fedora: on
infrastructure and services around that.

As I understand it, this was something like 2-3 full-time equivalent
positions just doing repackaging and associated work. I don't know the
precise number. That might not seem like a lot, but if you've ever scrambled
for req's for a project, you know it's a big deal. Red Hat's RHEL
organization does not actually have a lot of extra fat to spare. But there
is a lot of work that needs to be done to make the CentOS Stream
infrastructure.

So, like I've said before, the given explanation of "we want to
actually
focus resources" makes total sense to me as an important driver. Instead of
doing what is essentially duplicative work, people paid to work on CentOS
specifically can act as catalysts, and the hundreds of people in the RHEL
organization who previously didn't look at CentOS at all are now CentOS
developers directly.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader