It looks like IBM wants to financially capitalise on Centos and fed up with it being free.
Yeah, I was thinking something along similar lines. I thought this would happen around the beginning of their acquisition, but it seems like they just waited a long time before pulling the trigger. Disappointing, but not surprising.
I meant to update this a while back. It looks like CloudLinux, who you know Jay, are jumping in to safeguard the Centos operation, though of course it will not be called CentOS. They are saying that it will be run as a community project with the benefits of their knowledge of CloudLinux. It’s all in a blog on their website. From personal experience looking after a club’s Joomla website at Rochen shared hosting who use CloudLinux it is a really good product.
Greg K has said that “Rocky OS” will be out before the end of CentOS 8 as a community project. (For others reading this Greg was one of the main guys behind the Original CentOS, before it was acquired by Redhat.) Both the CloudLinux and Rocky OS will be based on RH Linux.
This is true, I’m very excited to see what CloudLinux comes out with. I can actually say in good faith that there are some cool announcements coming from that company pretty soon, so stay tuned to my channel and I’ll be talking about it when I’m free to do so. I’m very excited to see where this goes.
One of the benefits often overlooked, and MS fell foul of this, was you can get a lot of data and testers with a free Open Source Community Driven version. You don’t have to employ loads of developers or testers and much of that data will be in a production environment. OK you can sell support, though it is highly likely that the issue will be found earlier and likely to resolved earlier when you have both the community and your own staff involved than in a proprietary model.
I agree with you. I think the general rule is this - don’t piss off your customers, especially with an open-source product. Your customers may fork it and come out with something better. I’m not necessarily saying any of the solutions that are available are better (yet) - but look at what happened with XCP-NG, it totally eclipses its parent project IMHO.
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Yes saw your video on AlmaLinux and very good it looks. Looking forward to the official production release.
Oh my friend whose company that he works for had many instances of CENTOS are migrating to Ubuntu due to the demise of CENTOS as we knew it.
Shame on Redhat/IBM for doing this. They should have, at minimum, stated that the CentOS project would change at the end of it’s scheduled lifecycle, not before then.
This really made me think about how I was going to move forward. My first thought was to wait for Rocky Linux, but the timing didn’t work out for me. I wanted to move off of CentOS sooner. I thought about the impact that a commercially-influenced decision like this could make and that prompted me to select a Linux distro that was not directly backed by a company. I use and support RHEL at work, which was the main reason that I choose to run CentOS on my servers at home. In the end, I decided to move to Debian for my server needs at home.
On my desktop/laptops, I use Solus Linux with the Plasma desktop, although I do have an MX Linux VM as well. MX Linux is another great distro. I really love all of the extra MX Linux specific tools they include. Very useful. But, Solus is my current favorite desktop Linux distro.
I watched Jay’s YT on this. I knew about the demise, but, didn’t know it was as bad as it was.
I did some work for a local university which was all based on CentOS 8 (they insisted on upgrading from 7 to 8), and now they are regretting it.
The thing that irritated me was, they committed to a long term support model, then pulled it. Java has suffered (over the years) some of the same fate with Oracle, but luckily somebody got it in their heads that Java-8 can’t simply drop off the radar.
I get it that business needs change, so does the landscape, but what IBM did was particularly bad given the proliferation of CentOS (server) out in the wild.
I have similar concerns over Github and Microsoft. Gitlab is sounding more and more attractive everyday 
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Though I think that IBM had some involvement I also think from different things that I have read, including from some that appear to have been RH personnel, that some at RH had wanted to do this for some time and that IBM taking over RH gave them their head. CENTOS was underneath a lot of devices, IBM blade servers for instance that were really rebadged oracle’s, and NAS/SANs from various manufacturers so it wasn’t just you and me that this affected, and may be part of the main reason RH went down this route with CENTOS. The good thing is that there are or will be replacements like Almalinux and Rocky Linux as well as known versions from other enterprise level distros. At least with Almalinux you will be able to migrate by way of their scripts and it will also be completely free.
Agreed. I’m considering gitlab as an alternative to github.