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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight.

Shocking, because I'd never imagined they'd kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it's killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I'd thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever.

Blindingly obvious, of course, because Red Hat bought CentOS, presumably with real $$$, and IBM bought Red Hat for $34bln.

What's going to happen next? Microsoft buying Canonical and all businesses running either IBM Linux or Microsoft Linux? Crazier things have happened...

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Its time for a new internet rule. If Oracle or IBM buys your vendor, you should be migrating.

Sad, but accurate.

That's almost true for any project getting acquired. The big EvilCorp will always have it's overbearing corporatey corporateness crush the things that made the project so cool it attracted their attention to it. There are very few projects that actually improved from being acquired.

Should probably add Salesforce to that list too. They’re basically the new Oracle.

And CA, where software goes to die.

Serious question: are they? I know they've made a lot of acquisitions over the years, but I don't recall any widely-circulated stories of "Salesforce takes beloved thing and destroys it". The major open-source-friendly company I know of that Salesforce bought was Heroku, and a lot of people seem to use Heroku without even knowing that they are owned by Salesforce (and have been since 2010). It seems like it's too early to say anything definitive about what their purchase of Slack is going to change, although Slack has been making itself quite enterprise-focused all on its own.

This isn't a new rule. This has been the standard for a long time.

It's a money grab, pure and simple. They've (Redhat, let alone IBM) done it before (see below).

What happens in practice with this sort of "rolling release" is users end up patching endlessly in production, which no sane person or organization would ever want to do. This was the exact situation for another Redhat acquisition for years now. JBoss EAP and community editions (wildfly now I suppose), everyone who could moved off of JBoss long ago.

Except IBM thinks that this will convert everyone to RHEL licenses and I'm positive that is not what's going to happen.

Ubuntu is already the default for people with ML pipelines and more and more vendors are targeting Ubuntu first for their software.

CentOS will be effectively dead for a lot of companies starting next year (or 2024). (At least we aren't planning on licensing 10^5 systems on RHEL...). I imagine for those same companies, RHEL isn't far behind it.

What's even worse here is that at least for us there are some things that we pay for RHEL for. If we switch all of our other servers, those RHEL licenses won't be continuing either.

Obvious, but stupid.

Why wouldn't they switch to Debian instead? Their emphasis on stability matches that of CentOS more than Ubuntu, or at least did.

Because some important vendors don't target Debian whereas they do target Ubuntu.

Canonical and RedHat are paying the salaries of the people steering the direction of Linux as a whole. They're forcing you to choose between the two.

Your forgetting Suse, I'll bet they take a big chunk of the customer base. OpenSuse LEAP is now identical to SLES and it can be converted easily if you want support.

But LEAP is only supported for 36 months? https://en.opensuse.org/Lifetime

That's pretty weak sauce even compared to the five years Debian and Ubuntu offer. And Debian actually supports all their packages, unlike Ubuntu which tricks people into installing unpatched garbage from 'universe'

Supported for "at least" 36 months. You can get extended support and it's usually quiet a bit more.

Do you know what kind of price range would that be?

You'd have to convert to SLES and buy extended support.

Ubuntu has more predictable long term support.

Yes clearly: we use CentOS at work because it's free (as in beer). If I go to my boss to ask money for a RedHat license he would laugh me out of his office.

This. We run CentOS for non-critical stuff and RHEL for stuff that really needs support. If we need to switch off CentOS we certainly won't be using RHEL either. Doesn't make sense to be running a Debian flavour mixed with RHEL since the two a significantly different.

Just wait when Mark Shuttleworth decides not to sponsor the project any longer.

Ubuntu followed Red-Hat's footsteps away from desktop into the server room, as there is no money to be done there, and it will follow it still, if there is still not enough money on the server.

Just so we're clear, you don't want updates ?

FreeBSD is starting to look really good.

I agree. I've been seeing more and more about the BSD's online recently, and to be quite honest, I'm happy about that.

Just installed OpenBSD for the first time the other day, and am loving it.

This might help you on your start:

https://github.com/liv-io/ansible-roles-bsd

Looks like a nice resource, many thanks!

I would agree that BSD systems are nicer to look at, and FreeBSD supporting major releases for five years, with forcing people to install point releases once a year is really quite nice.

But I don't see BSD becoming practical as a platform to run (commercial enterprise) Linux software, when it's already a pain to get packages and support for anything that's not RHEL/CentOS.

It's not ideal, but you can run Linux software on FreeBSD. Commercial enterprise tends to be conservative and not need bleeding edge Linux interfaces that may not be available through the linux emulation layer yet.

What are the usual roadblocks for people?

Needing VMs to perform well, comparably to KVM/Xen, would be a blocker for going BSD.

Jails are awesome but not containers you're blocked there as well (if you need containers and the tooling around them).

>VMs to perform well, comparably to KVM/Xen

Bhyve performs very well.

>Jails are awesome but not containers you're blocked there as well

What are containers? Ansible with OS-Virtualisation right? So with Jails and Salt/Ansible/puppet or Templates you have your Containers.

OR just take that:

https://bastillebsd.org/

> Red Hat bought CentOS, presumably with real $$$,

if I remember right technically centos didn't really exist as an entity that could be bought, Red Hat just hired all the developers (there were only ever 3-4 people working on centos). I would guess they are now working on Centos Streams, or have moved on to other things entirely. Its not like Centos has been killed off either, so it didn't cost a lot and this wont really save anything, it's "just" a change of focus.

Microsoft buying ubuntu would be an interesting (and not impossible) move though.

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