Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

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That sounds like some great revisionist history.

Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap.

In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what?

Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks.

Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility.

As I said then, "no thanks."

Jeff, plenty of smarter people than me came out against you to correct your crusade. As a practicing Christian, I'd expect more from you than coming out to lead a mob frothing at the mouth for blood. You didn't even try and have a reasonable discourse with Red Hatters. As an influencer, you have a responsibility not to encourage this kind of social media vitriol that's become all too common. It's a contagion upon the human mind and you are directly responsible for whipping people up in this one.

> plenty of smarter people than me came out against you to correct your crusade.

Doesn't mean they were right.

Ex-Redhatter that watched stuff go down while defending it till I stopped (much after I left). That's not Redhat anymore, it's IBM.

The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.

RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.

Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.

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