[sf-lug] a tiny bit of news and Any one for Games?

[Rick Moen]

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

> You know i presume that CentOS which was compiled from the RH upstream
> sources is going out of business due to the IBM ownership one assumes.

Well, I'm pretty sure it's not correct to assert this resulted from IBM
buying RHAT.

The supportive relationship Red Hat had with the CentOS developers
worked for all parties starting, IIRC, 2014 -- but things have changed
since then.  Here's the best explanation I've seen
(https://lwn.net/Articles/839363/):

  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.

Or, to put it in a plainer way, RHAT decided after a few years that
it could no longer get sufficient value from CentOS to serve its
business model, to justify the major ongoing money it was putting into
the thing.

Of course, there is ongoing perceived need for an unbranded, no-contract
RHEL rebuild; thus the scramble to set up CentOS-like community projects
to fill that niche -- exactly what happened before when Red Hat orphaned
RHL after v. 9 and cut over to RHEL.  There was a scramble that produced
White Box Enterprise Linux, Tao Linux, Pie Box Enterprise Linux, cAos
Linux, Scientific Linux, Lineox Enterprise Linux, X/OS Linux, StartCom
Enterprise Linux, Engineering Computing GNU/Linux, Eadem Enterprise
AS....   It took a couple of years for most of these to die, some to
adapt, and CentOS to become the commodity solution.

That will happen again.  The smart money, so far, is still on Rocky
Linux, in part because my friend Greg Kurtner, who is one of the heads
of the project, has done this before with CentOS (and, before that, cAos
Linux).