This is really, really bad for the majority of us using CentOS. – User Matt Phelps on the CentOS Project mailing list
On December 8, Red Hat and CentOS announced the decision to switch the CentOS distribution to CentOS Stream. CentOS 8 is no longer officially supported after 2021. Most importantly, CentOS Stream will be upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the commercial version developed by Red Hat, instead of downstream. The direction of the CentOS project has changed dramatically. The decision sparked heated discussion in the community and among users, who criticized it. Someone even created a web page (centos.rip/) similar to the CentOS official interface to mock Red Hat.
CentOS project
- The Fedora project was founded in 2003 and was sponsored by Red Hat from the start.
- In 2004, Red Hat released its own commercial Linux distribution, RHEL. RHEL uses Fedora upstream, but the release cycle is longer.
- In 2004, CentOS project was established. CentOS is a community supported distribution that uses RHEL as its upstream.
- Red Hat began sponsoring CentOS in 2014 and established a partnership with the company. Red Hat took ownership of the CentOS trademark and recruited most of the core developers.
- In 2020, CentOS 8 was released.
Due to protocol limitations, almost all Linux distributions provide the source code, even red Hat, the giant of the open source space. Red Hat is the commercial version of RHEL, but red Hat doesn’t release a full history of source code changes, just the final code, which can be used by anyone.
In contrast to Fedora, RHEL is entirely developed and maintained by Red Hat. Developers can obtain a free license from Red Hat to use RHEL, but pay a fee for commercial use and support. RHEL has a longer release cycle than Fedora and is more stable. RHEL generates significant annual revenue for Red Hat.
Since RHEL’s source code is open and free, and its quality is so high, the idea of building a distribution based on its source code is a natural one. In 2004, CentOS was born. Also created were Scientific Linux, which is now defunct, and Oracle Linux, which is not as well known as CentOS.
CentOS received sponsorship from Red Hat in 2014. Red Hat acquired ownership of the CentOS project trademark and recruited most of the core developers, who were internally independent of the RHEL division. Now, CentOS’s elite leadership is all Red Hat employees, so it has absolute influence over the community. From this point on, the CentOS project was no longer a purely community driven project.
There are two common models of open source domain governance – benevolent autocrats and meritocracy, with the CentOS project using the latter. That is, a handful of elites run the program, mostly voting to settle differences.
Switch to CentOS Stream
CentOS Stream is a release that comes with CentOS 8. The main difference between CentOS and it is the rolling distribution, which means that there is no one big version, but only small versions released regularly. It also meant a shift in the development model from waterfall to agile.
CentOS Stream will have one more fundamental change since December 8. Get rid of CentOS and move the CentOS Stream distribution upstream of RHEL, which is exactly what the CentOS project was set up to do — use a stable distribution supported by commercial companies. CentOS now has a role very similar to Fedora, perhaps a little more stable than Fedora. In terms of test phases, Fedora is alpha, CentOS is beta, and RHEL is final.
As the News went out, complaints appeared everywhere: on official mailing lists, on Hacker News, on Slashdot, and in various News outlets. It is fair to say that the news provoked outrage.
Impact of the event
The decisions made by the CentOS project affect many people, mainly users, but also developers and companies.
The user
The system administrator of CentOS 8, who just upgraded CentOS 7 to CentOS 8, is going to be furious. Upgrading is not an easy thing to do, and it could have been put off for a few years, ten years at the most, to be exact.
If you continue to use CentOS 8, you are using a system that is no longer maintained, which means you are not secure and you cannot use the newly released software. Switching to CentOS Stream will require some work, which officials promise will be “minimal.” But users are already reporting problems on the mailing list. Switching to CentOS Stream also means that you may be using a less stable system, namely a beta test version. Through testing over the years, users have come to appreciate red Hat’s ability to develop and test, and only what they release can be considered final. Only one company’s version can be considered stable. Does that mean open source is just another word for unstable?
In addition to switching to another project, the user has a choice. Since this is an open source project, they can put a lot of work into testing CentOS and fixing bugs to make it as stable a system as RHEL.
developers
After the CentOS project has established a partnership with Red Hat, the developer already has an interest binding relationship with it. Therefore, it is only natural to make decisions that are good for the company in the run of a supposedly open source project that is led almost exclusively by Red Hat employees.
In addition to red Hat employees, there are some community developers. Their attitude is also important, whether they support the change or invest in other projects, after all, everyone’s time is precious.
The company
Red Hat appears to be the biggest winner of this shift. By switching to CentOS Stream, users lose a stable distribution based on RHEL. Some of them may choose to use a paid RHEL distribution in order to keep their business stable, up and running, and reduce some of their workload. This was something he was very happy to see.
However, one scenario cannot be ruled out. When users are generally dissatisfied with the project, the project is likely to fail. Users may switch to another project, the Scientific Linux project is no longer maintained, but Oracle Linux is still around. In addition, CentOS early founder Gregory Kurtzer — who left the CentOS project — has publicly announced his intention to create Rocky Linux, a new project to replace CentOS, and so far there is only one empty warehouse on Github.
Given that Red Hat’s reputation could be damaged by the incident, Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu distribution, could benefit. Red Hat and Canonical have long been rivals in the open source space. Ubuntu is based on Debian and CentOS is based on Fedora, but both are based on the Linux ecosystem. Canonical has long struggled to commercialise and lacks red Hat’s sizeable revenues. Canonical’s revenue was $100 million in 2018, compared with $10 billion for Red Hat, according to data.
conclusion
This episode shows how easily open source projects can be abandoned when they become a liability in the hands of large corporations. Big companies support open source projects for their own benefit, not for the benefit of others, especially those who don’t pay. Whether CentOS Stream becomes a Stream in the future depends on the attitude of developers, users, and companies. Maybe the backlash will prompt Red Hat to reverse its decision, maybe the decision will still go ahead, maybe a new project will pop up. But without a fundamental solution to the problem of inadequate testing of open source projects without the involvement of big companies, results have not changed, but have been delayed.
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read
- Open source project management model (opensourceway.com munity/posts/found…
- The CentOS Project shifts the focus to CentOS Stream (blog.centos.org/2020/12/fut…
- Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed the Open Source Innovation (www.redhat.com/en/about/pr…
- The CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat (lists.centos.org/pipermail/c…
- CentOS Governce (www.centos.org/about/gover…
- CentOS 8 Ending Next Year To Focus Shift On CentOS Stream (linux.slashdot.org/story/20/12…
- Ubuntu to burn money – the story of an idealist (www.leiphone.com/news/201406…
- Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253…
- Rocky Linux Homepage (Rockylinux.org/)