[CentOS] CentOS 8 future

Matthew Miller
Fri, 18 Dec 2020 18:35:45 -0000

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