[CentOS] CentOS 8 future

Peter Eckel
Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:07:59 -0000

Hi Johnny,

> $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.

I don't doubt your numbers, they sound perfectly reasonable to me.

On the other hand: How many of the employees will be laid off or reallocated now
that CentOS point releases are no longer published? How many of the servers will
be shut down, how many service contracts will be cancelled? What's your
estimate of the reduction in bandwidth that will be saved by replacing point
releases by a stream of releases with more frequent updates?

> 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.

Too bad.

I've just completed a migration of about 30 servers from CentOS 6 to CentOS
8, expecting to get another 9 years of lifetime out of that (substantial) work.
Now I have one year left of that, in which I need to plan what to do. One option
is to go with the flow and switch to Stream, but I must admit that it's not
my favourite one. Rocky, Lenix or maybe Springsdale would be the next best
guesses. But given the fact that I migrated the whole setup process to Ansible
it might be a good idea to jump off the cliff and switch to Debian or FreeBSD.
As I said, I have one year left  which I plan to use for evaluation of options.

Two of my big customers will definitely not have that range of options. One of
them is a RHEL shop with a tendency to try Debian, and last week they strongly
thought about leaving the RHEL space entirely. The FOSS team there had made
substantial effort over the last year to get CentOS on the list of
company-approved operating systems (currently that's only RHEL and Debian),
and now that work has gone down the drain completely. You can imagine how they
feel now.

The other one is stuck with RHEL-based distributions (Oracle, you know) - but
they consider switching to OEL with support as well. At least they'll get
rid of the hassle with the RHN that way, which can be a pain in the backside.

I doubt those two are the only ones. My guess is this decision will backfire big
time. I would love to stand corrected in one year's time, because I really
like the RHEL way of doing things. Or rather, I liked it. Until last week. Still
a great set of products, but the trustworthiness of Red Hat has taken a big hit
for me, and for my customers as well.

Anyway, thank you and the rest of the CentOS team for all the great work
you've done and are doing. It is appreciated, and it will not be forgotten.

  Peter.