Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

> Red Hat, which purchased the company behind CoreOS in 2018, will, as of Sept.1, 2020, delete all CoreOS images. That means even if you wanted to download CoreOS (without supported updates), you won’t be able to.

> 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)?

[1]: https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/

Flatcar Container Linux is a drop-in replacement for CoreOS Container Linux which in my mind (I conceived the fork) makes it more than "an (almost) equivalent alternative". You can literally update straight into Flatcar from CoreOS using the standard update process. See https://docs.flatcar-linux.org/os/update-from-container-linu...

So, Flatcar is to CoreOS as Centos is to RHEL (if you ignore that CoreOS is going away). The differences make it not entirely analogous, but it's probably an easy way express it in very few words.

Currently for the stable and beta channels that is true for now. Of course that changes in May when we fully take over maintenance. But for the alpha channel, and experimental edge channel, we have already diverged with updated packages.

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.

Is this an issue of RedHat just buying and killing a competitor?

CoreOS was a competitor but it hasn't really been killed. CoreOS technology is still available but they changed the names of the products when they broke backwards compatibility.

At least in the open source world, other people can continue maintaining the project under a new name (dependent on the specific license). I wonder how Flatcar and Fedora CoreOS will converge/diverge.

Also, was rkt not open source? Or was it just depreciated?

rkt was always open source. It was donated to the CNCF and eventually "retired" by them.

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