On 27/04/2019 14:15, Maarten wrote:

> Hello fellow SL users,

> 

> I having been using SL for a while now, after the CentOS project became

> part of Redhat I was glad that I was using SL because I would think that

> CentOS would become a middle testing ground for Redhat to test new things,

> getting the idea SL would stay closer to the source since it just being

> another clone. Now that it has been announced that there will be no SL8,

> what's the best clone to switch to after EOL of SL6 and SL7. Even though 

> Redhat says that  CentOS will never be used as a testing ground or switch

> how they are doing things, I do not believe what they say now will be the

> same in the future.



First of all, it is Red Hat (two words) :)



But I don't really understand this Red Hat scepticism.  What would Red Hat,

even from a commercial standpoint, win by crippling CentOS or it's open source

efforts in any way?  Yes, what Red Hat does costs money, but they also earn

money on exactly what they do.  I don't think Red Hat's biggest fear is that

CentOS will "overtake" RHEL.  I would suspect Red Hat biggest fear is users

moving *away* from the RHEL universe, moving to other non-RHEL based

distributions, that the mindset changes to be something else than RHEL -

because migration from SL/CentOS to RHEL is simpler and smoother than any

other distro.  I would expect Red Hat to be far more concerned about users

moving towards SUSE, Debian or Ubuntu.  Nowadays in the container oriented

world, even Alpine Linux might be a growing concern.  And just because of

this, it would be little market gain to "experiment" with CentOS and risk

upsetting its users.



I've lost count how big Red Hat has grown, but they're at least somewhere in

the 12-15k people today.  The vast majority here are geeks who embraces open

source development.  The company markets open source as it's key motivation.

Even Jim Whitehurst runs Fedora on his home computers (unless something has

changed the last few years).  If Red Hat does a bad move, I would expect quite

an uproar inside the company as well.  Keyword here is: memo-list [0].



And *if* Red Hat messes up CentOS ... what do you think would happen?  Red Hat

can't shut-off complete access to the source code RHEL/CentOS requires.  I

would expect a massive part of the CentOS community to pick up where Red Hat

dropped the ball.  Remember, CentOS has only been part of Red Hat the last 5

years.  This has been done before, it can still happen again.



CentOS is first of all a downstream Linux distribution, based on RHEL.  RHEL

is a downstream distribution, based on packages from Fedora.  So Red Hat

doesn't really need CentOS to be anything like experimental.  It already has

that playground with Fedora.



And IIRC (please correct me if I'm wrong), SL is mostly built from the CentOS

source RPM packages.





[0]

<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.managementexchange.com_story_employee-2Dled-2Devolution-2Dmemo-2Dlist-2Dred-2Dhat&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=YTRGiN5a1Cfo4D6fIyh12UcYoRid7jhv04YouX6ODmA&s=sGk5xrz5ADxPWwEBuLRjDdF8Dj52eRKZfRmI6yYtGo4&e=>





--

kind regard,



David Sommerseth