[sf-lug] Fresh on Distowatch...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     Distribution Release: EuroLinux 8.3 is another
> clone of Red Hat EPL.  More of those available
> now than ever before.  Could IBM made a mistake
> in quenching CentOS?  

How do you figure?

{sigh}

CentOS was costing IBM/Red Hat significant money, and 
bringing in no revenue.  It was generous of them to host the project for 
seven years, sort of.  

And the business _reason_ IBM/Red Hat chose, for seven years, to make
that sort of ongoing outlay, came to an end, which is why the
sponsorship ended.  An LWN.net reader wrote a simple account of this
dynamic, back in December:

  This is not about IBM and not about beancounting.

  CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat's upstream for layered products
  (at the time mostly RDO and oVirt) could not use Fedora because it was
  too far from RHEL a year of two after RHEL was released, could not use
  RHEL because upstream contributors would have to pay, and could not use
  CentOS because its releases had too large delays.  The solution was to
  make CentOS releases happen timely by paying people to make them.

  These days a RHEL downstream is not enough for the layered products.
  Some of them require the kind of bleeding-edge feature that is
  backported every six months to the RHEL kernel, and corresponding
  userspace changes (BPF, virtualization, etc.) and cannot afford waiting
  for the CentOS release because development must be done in parallel with
  RHEL.  So the solution was to move CentOS from happening *after* RHEL to
  *before* RHEL.

  And that's it. It may not be a pleasant change for everyone, but it's a
  change that has strictly technical motives.


"RDO" is a project to exploit OpenStack.  "oVirt" is an open source
management platform for virtualisation based on RHEL.  "BPF" is Berkeley
Packet Filter aka Linux Socket Filtering.

Honestly, Bobbie, you ought to avoid commenting on business strategy
when you just don't understand what's going on.