On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 11:17 PM David Sommerseth
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:


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

Yes!

:)


> But I don't really understand this Red Hat scepticism.

Anti-corporate world attitude?


> What would Red Hat, even from a commercial standpoint, win by
> crippling CentOS or its 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 its 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.

Red hat can limit access to its source RPMs to its paying customers
and prevent free rebuilds, but it's not in its interest to do so.
CentOS gives Red Hat's customers a large pool of RHEL-compatible
sysadmins.