Say Goodbye to CoreOS
thenewstack.io
thenewstack.io
> Although Fedora CoreOS is the official replacement for CoreOS, there are a few use cases it cannot replace, such as:
> No native support for Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE, Vagrant, or Container Linux community-supported platforms. The rkt container runtime, originally developed by CoreOS, is missing.
Have these images of CoreOS (that RedHat will delete) not been added to the Wayback Machine yet? Or not backed up anywhere else?
> For those looking for a non-Red Hat alternative should check out the Flatcar Linux project, [1] a fork of CoreOS Container Linux.
So there is an (almost) equivalent alternative for those who use the images that are going to be deleted (and one that doesn't have the limitations of Fedora CoreOS)?
Also, was rkt not open source? Or was it just depreciated?
But, yes, in the beginning we simply removed the CoreOS trademark similar to how CentOS removes the RHEL trademark. But very different from CentOS, we knew from the start that the upstream would eventually go away and all maintenance would be carried by Kinvolk and other contributors.
I wouldn't be surprised at this move if I were a CoreOS user, but I would be pretty pissed off that the next 6 months of my work would be migrating to a new platform for production work, all because the Linux distro I used got bought for its IP and customer list.
Or, say when HashiCorp is eventually bought, and suddenly its parent company decides, no more free tools for you, kids! Buy our other, more crappy products instead, but here's some free samples you can use at small scale. Also you need to rewrite all your code.
This extends to virtually every important project in the cloud computing ecosystem. They're all just run by companies, not a distributed decentralized community of users and developers (cat-herded by a BDFL) like every successful multi-generational open source project. There's also only one widely-supported Linux distribution in the world which isn't run by a corporation, meaning if that distribution ever goes down, everyone who uses Linux for more than its kernel is at the mercy of that given corporation, and we'll probably see massive fragmentation.
Open Source and GNU basically got its start to prevent corporations from preventing you from doing what you wanted with software, but it had a nasty side-effect: they can now make whatever you do with it obsolete and unsupportable. A bit like a car manufacturer no longer shipping replacement parts, forcing you to find some machinists to support an aging fleet of obsolete vehicles. And sure, if the impact is only to corporate engineers, who cares, but as one of those engineers, it is very annoying that we literally are letting them do this to us.
As developers or users it is a good idea to push projects we're involved with to have non-corporate distribute governance to begin with, or move in that direction.
Of course, that requires multiple people from different organizations or unaffiliated to "adopt" projects as the "apple of their eye", enough to be involved in managing it; and to avoid deterioration into the one-developer-project case. So, a lot of effort by a lot of people, we should each do our part where we are involved.
Also, I'm sure there are lots of GNU/Linux distros which aren't run by a commercial corporation; certainly more than one.
Goodbye CoreOS.
I wonder how far they'd have gotten if they'd refused to sell.
I get moving on / cutting product lines but I don’t see the need to delete all the images.
That's probably about it. Right now, I'm jumping on the k8s bandwagon, but looking to keep it simple. As much as I'd like to look at nomad seriously, too many times I've been caught by not looking at the mainstream.