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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL. This front runner role was actually intended for Fedora however Fedora contains way too much experimental changes for anyone to seriously try to run it on servers.

I don't want to sound too "tin-foil headed" but I guess now that RedHat has hired the main CentOS dev(s?) this change comes from RedHat. I can't imagine the CentOS user base wants this direction for the CentOS project (or maybe thats just my lack of imagination...). People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don't want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

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> People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don't want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

I use CentOS a lot for prototyping projects destined to be put on RHEL servers. I like it as a try-before-you-buy version of RHEL, and this change makes that use case a lot less useful.

I think that your use-case matches perfectly with RHEL free developer license.

The free RHEL development license doesn't allow for even a whim of something that could be considered production usage.

So you can't make a proof of concept with the RHEL developer license in which you let "the business", customers, etc. toy around for a while.

A group of us was sent to Red Hat for a kernel class (week long, excellent) over 10 years ago. We were moving off HP-UX which offered really excellent real time extensions (disabling interups on a per cpu basis...processor sets, and other fun)

The instructor told us if we wanted to try some of the things we were doing in class to experiment more, we could try it on CentOS. it was the practically the same. This was before Red Hat “ acquired” them.

>>Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS

That is only true if CentOS continues to be widely adopted, with this move by RedHat i do not see that continuing, I am sure many org's right now are looking for options to move off CentOS / RHEL stacks.

RHEL bought CentOS 6 years ago.

Note that the announcement blog post points folks to using RedHat instead.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish succeeded?

If they just want a free (beer) RHEL clone, the best choice might turn out to be ... Oracle Linux. Who would have thought?

Isn't Amazon Linux basically the same? Or is that a fork of CentOS in the first place?

Can I download and run Amazon Linux at home (non-vm)?

Not really. You can use Alibaba Cloud Linux 2 like that if you want but why would you do that? Oracle Linux, CloudLinux, Debian or openSUSE Leap are better choices.

CentOS is how RedHat releases their sources in compliance with open source licenses (Presumably they're going back to releasing them as a consequence for this).

My familiarity with Amazon Linux is about 4 years out-of-date these days, but it was a RHEL/CentOS clone with a number of the core libraries like glibc being updated and maintained by Amazon on an independent life cycle.

> might turn out to be ... Oracle Linux

Is CentOS the upstream for Oracle Linux? Instead of which comes CentOS Stream and then the question is what will Oracle do? Would they even try to keep the old CentOS concept alive?

I'm pretty sure that OEL is derived directly from RHEL, particularly because OEL 8 shipped while CentOS was still figuring out how to deal with streams.

EDIT: This may be inaccurate; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348496

> People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don't want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

There's a lot of people using CentOS indirectly, through CloudLinux. Whatever happens there, a lot of people will be affected.

And Scientific Linux, and Amazon Linux, etc.

SL never released version 8 (they switched to CentOS8). Amazon (correct me if I'm wrong) does not release installer ISOs. AFAIK, closest to a plain free RHEL8 clone is Oracle Linux.

There's also Springdale Linux.

Wow I forgot it existed. I must've erased it from my mind along with Scientific Linux. Nice to see they've kept it up-to-date so far.

> People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don't want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

How dare they want a free operating system?

How dare tens of thousands of developers produce a free operating system, and it gets sold by one business who added graphics of a trademarked hat?

Sounds straightforward to maintain your own fork in that case.

You do realize that a non-trivial number of contributions to Linux come from professional developers working at companies like Google, IBM, and RH?

Agreed, a significant part of Linux's graphical stack (GNOME, mesa, pipewire, etc.) is maintained by people whose email end in @redhat.com

For now. As with all acquisitions it's only a matter of when.

Except acquisitions work out just as often as they don't.

> Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL.

I thought that Fedora was already serving this role

Not really. RHEL / CentOS is basically a hardened snapshot of Fedora taken every few years, with a few bespoke changes on top. So in that sense you could argue that Fedora is a front-runner for "the next RHEL" but at any point in time it is too far ahead of the current RHEL to be a useful testbed in any respect for those users. Although I guess you could argue that it helps knock down bugs in packages like GNOME that do get updated regularly in RHEL.

CentOS Stream is basically "the next x.y release of RHEL". Some updates, like GNOME updates and new hardware enablement, will be present in CentOS Stream a few months before they are released to RHEL and CentOS as part of a new x.y-release.

Yes, this is exactly it. The conspiracy theories about buying-CentOS-to-kill it are understandable but totally off-base. Red Hat brought CentOS in-house at a time when the company was trying to grow from being a single-product company to a portfolio one, and it became clear that Fedora wasn't working for what at the time RH called "layered products". The hope was that CentOS would provide a more-RHEL-like community place for work like RDO to happen. That was partially successful, but the plan wasn't really realized — and speaking from a Fedora point of view, that "Fedora is failing at a thing we need so we'll turn to CentOS" wasn't a healthy dynamic for either project. CentOS Stream serves the initial purpose better, and now RH's distro ecosystem story is actually linear rather than a crazy MC Escher contortion.

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