I share the sentiment.
Gawd. Freaking. Dammit.
I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community.
Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
Gawd. Freaking. Dammit.
I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community.
Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
If you look at what runs on production servers, it's virtually always RHEL/CentOS, or Debian/Ubuntu. Everybody else isn't even above 5%, and most of those you've listed are in fractional digits.
For another data point, if you look at websites, Debian+Ubuntu is already >50%. At this point, I think it's well on its way to becoming the Linux distro, with everything else being relegated to the hacker/boutique niche. And I think that this announcement, and what IBM is likely to do with RHEL afterwards, will accelerate that trend substantially.
With the current state of things, forking Fedora seems unlikely to be a wise decision. RedHat is the major contributor, paying the salaries of many Fedora developers. So far, nothing has changed here with that acquisition.
OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).
While people do have a reasonable level of hostility over the Novell acquisition (which has left some deep cultural scar tissue within SUSE), they did give us openSUSE.
Overall there is often worry when we have an acquisition (since a very large portion of openSUSE maintainers are employed by SUSE). With EQT quite a few folks were worried about how separated the finances were between openSUSE and SUSE and I believe Richard Brown commented on how exactly he's pushing for better financial and trademark separation (the only two things that they really share anymore).
So while people do get worried every one in a while, I get the impression that overall things are going okay despite the series of acquisitions in recent years.
However, Fedora/RedHat have a different structure and relationship and I wouldn't use the openSUSE/SUSE model to predict how things will work out.
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
That was the sentiment regarding OpenSolaris when Oracle bought Sun... (And I can't believe no one's mentioned this in 800+ comments so far.)
Could you expand on that? I'm curious.
Maybe we'll see more community offerings?
Never actually used RHEL, but I've heard that they're basically the same - one comes with the support, the other obviously doesn't.
Is CentOS supported by Red Hat, so IBM in theory could shut them down?
I assumed Redhat was going to capture lost revenue by somehow making CentOS less viable.
IBMs business nature makes me think its even more likely now.
They're different products for different customers. Folks who want to work cheap and hack their own stuff together will use CentOS and would never have bought a RHEL license anyway.
Meanwhile, folks who need a "we've got support" answer for every question will use RHEL and wouldn't be tempted by CentOS anyway; the cost savings is not worth the risk.
This is possible because everything in Redhat/Fedora/Centos is open source.
I'd be willing to bet numerous people are working on a non IBM/Redhat version of Centos.
Buying an open source company only makes sense if you give the employees of that company exactly what they want. They are the real value.
Of course in practice that requires a lot of coordination, there's a ton of legal hoops to jump through and you end up with a big company built around customers it doesn't currently have.
Kidding aside, nothing about this is good for the open source movement.