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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

Someone can just make their own community edition. This isn’t Microsoft here.

Wasn’t that basically what CentOS started out as - as a community edition of RHEL that you didn’t pay Redhat for? And then Redhat generously offered to sponsor the project? And then all the trademarks and other minutiae of running the project were transferred to Redhat? And now Redhat changes CentOS to make it less like RHEL?

IIRC, Redhat also made it more difficult to make a RHEL clone in order to neuter Oracle Linux and other possible RHEL clones and the sponsoring of CentOS was to have a cost-free RHEL clone in their direct sphere of influence.

I'm guessing you're talking about Red Hat stopping breaking out its kernel patches individually about 10 years ago?

That was to make it harder for Oracle to offer support for OEL, but made no difference to Centos & the non-commercial clones because they shipped the RH kernel unmodified and didn't need to worry about what any individual patch did.

I'm not sure its been a thing since RHEL6 either.

Source RPMs are also not publicly published anymore. The source is available in the CentOS git repos, will be interesting to see what happens after CentOS 8 ends.

I think this should serve as an important lesson for open source projects. Hopefully it will be a case of once bitten, twice shy for the community

You missed a step: There were several "community editions of RHEL", including Scientific Linux, which merged into CentOS (because why duplicate effort). They're not terribly happy either.

> Wasn’t that basically what CentOS started out as - as a community edition of RHEL that you didn’t pay Redhat for?

Literally "Community ENTerprise OS", yes:)

> And then Redhat generously offered to sponsor the project? And then all the trademarks and other minutiae of running the project were transferred to Redhat? And now Redhat changes CentOS to make it less like RHEL?

Correct.

Easier said than done, but CentOS's original developer is giving it some thought.

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