This confuses me. I feel like we have a good thing going here between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. If they succeed and kill RHEL profitability are we really better off?
And all of this is extra bad since those masses of CentOS installs exist because people don't really want to deal with Red Hat, but some other vendor just happened to not test their application on another distro, and corporate policies then don't allow you to run it on a non-binary-compatible system.
If there would be different packages, i.e. just an OCI image or a single statically linked program, or perhaps a vended virtual machine image, none of this OS vendor BS would exist. You would be able to run wherever you want to run, on whatever you want to run it. And some people and companies would still choose Red Hat, but anyone who has used anything else would probably not.
I relied heavily on CentOS but at least I'm being honest, I relied on CentOS because it was a free version of RHEL. People got so mad when RHEL took away their free OS that they make up all sorts of excuses.
Fact is Red Hat have been contributing back to open source for 25+ years. As far as companies goes, it's one of the best we have in the open source ecosystem.
So this is why we can't have nice things. When someone actually get successful in open source we try to destroy them.
It definitely is true, in our RHEL subscriptions we get patches that do not exist in CentOS. We also see those differences in fully patched systems where the patch versions run different binary code.
> I relied heavily on CentOS [..]
> Fact is [..]
> So this is why [..]
All those other arguments are not very relevant, they bought CentOS and then broke community trust multiple times to the point where we now have multiple re-incarnations of the CentOS concept and RHEL (or IBM) thought they could prevent that by hiding the sources used for current RHEL builds from the public by default.
Money-wise it's also not relevant because there are only two reasons you pay for support:
1. You actually need support (we never did in the past 15 years)
2. Corporate nonsense (this applies to some of our vendors)
Red Hat is fully leaning into #2 and it's just not having any real value if you don't also fit in #1.
Citation needed. Source: I work at Red Hat and made the policy that stuff needs to go to CentOS Stream first. The only exceptions should be embargoed or critical/important CVEs, those go to customers before CentOS Stream.
If you find any code, features, or bug sizes in RHEL that aren't in stream, it's a bug, let us know and we will fix it.
Maybe the issue wasn't highlighted as much in the past where the rebuild compatibility meant that packages could go out without also having the source (in CentOS).
Strong disagree. I benefit greatly from Fedora and CentOS Stream.
They will go full throttle boiling the frog if left to their own devices and every company who has done business with them knows it.