I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.
"CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard"
Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride.
Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray with CentOS that involved some long gaps between updates, a whole kerfuffle about a founder disappearing and the domain ownership being in question...
CentOS, as a project independent of Red Hat, existed for about 10 years. This included several long periods of slow updates to minor versions and long waits for major versions of RHEL. (e.g. it took almost 3 months for CentOS to push out 5.6 after RHEL 5.6, and even longer to get CentOS 6 out of RHEL 6).
Now, users have Stream which is pretty much everything you'd have wanted except the ability to claim that it's exactly specific RHEL release. In my book a major improvement, unless what I want is the ability to get support for RHEL from vendors without actually paying for RHEL.
A CentOS Stream release only gets updates as long as its equivalent RHEL release is in its "full support" period. In practice, this means that the support duration is cut from 10 years to 5 years.
Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the update will sometimes forget to commit it to CentOS Stream until a week or two after it's shipped. You end up in a weird position where you get most updates faster than RHEL users, but you often have to wait to get critical security updates. I would be wary about using a system like this in production.
CentOS Stream is on a different httpd patch release, it gets the fixes from upstream instead of backporting them. If you have a specific CVE number that you're thinking about, I can check the status internally.
_EDIT_: looks like it's not intentional, there are bugs that got to MODIFIED state despite the updates having not been pushed, and then got stuck there.
The value in RHEL is not just in the ability to call Red Hat for support. I submit that much more of the value of RHEL is in the packaging and maintenance processes. Selecting software, making sure it's enterprise ready, patching it, backporting fixes, QA and regression testing, etc. From my view inside the machine, Red Hat is still committed to an opensource development model, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The thing Red Hat is trying to do is find the balancing point between capturing, and giving away value, as Scott McCarty explains in this post: https://opensource.com/article/21/2/differentiating-products...
Since before I became a Red Hatter, I have used CentOS for my personal servers and projects. I have struggled with CentOS Stream for that application, for example packaged kernel drivers from ELRepo. I can understand why many are upset about this. As a casual user, I am not upset, because I still have lots of options (RHEL Dev sub, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) If I had given a lot of time and effort that benefited the EL community, and in turn, Red Hat. I would probably be more upset.
I find myself torn on this issue. On one hand, I really want there to be a vibrant Enterprise Linux community where nobody has doubts or trust issues in participating. On the other hand, I also want Red Hat to continue to have a viable business model around RHEL so that the community continues to be able to benefit from all of the expertise that it gets from all of the people who get to make it their main focus because they can rely on a steady paycheck by doing so.
I think that when Red Hat was growing fast, it was easy for them to have a laissez-faire approach to downstream rebuilds. Now that the business is contracting, people have had to start making hard decisions. There's no more difficult decision to make, than to lay off people. I would not want to have a leadership role at Red Hat right now. I don't expect it's much fun.
I really worry about the impact that this has on goodwill. I think most people at Red Hat are also concerned about this. The ecosystem around RHEL will not be the same. EPEL, ELRepo, and all of the other communities that have flourished around the downstream builds are going to be impacted. Trust, when broken, is very hard to rebuild. Jeff's comments ("fool me once...") underscore the rift that is driving away good people. I worry about the long-term effects of this. I hope that this will not "kill Enterprise Linux" as many have suggested. I do believe, though, that it has been wounded.
I think that Redhat’s been failing at the PR part of their business. I agree with all of your points about their motivation and value. They’re a valuable part of the community.
From an outsider’s perspective, they were merged with IBM, “killed off” CentOS, and restricted access to the sources of their distribution within a relatively short span. It just looks bad and makes everyone feel like they have to justify that Redhat is still a good company.
From my position, I don't feel any IBM influence. In fact, if Red Hat were still a publicly traded stock, I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now. That said, from the outside looking in, I know that a lot of people have a negative view of IBM, and I can understand how they would come to the conclusion that this has something to do with IBM.
Fully agree on the "PR Problem". It's tough to "control the narrative" in OSS. Based on my observations, I think Red Hat's approach is: Deliver the facts, ride out the storm, pick up the pieces and move on.
> I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now.
Well, you answered yourself why it went as it did. Don't you think answering to your shareholders is what keeps the company competitive and on the right course?
Not necessarily. The economic situation has been tough for everyone and maybe the shareholders could have asked for reducing the work done on Fedora or Stream for a short term benefit?
I don't see any link between shareholder demands and business viability, other than "keep the business profitable". What makes you think shareholders are more familiar with the market a company operates in than the company itself?
Interesting you link to opensource.com, I read that RedHat fired the entire team behind that site during the recent layoffs. I see that they might have found an alternative funding source though:
I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.