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

[Rick Moen]

[Redirecting back on-list.]

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

>> On what grounds do you say they're going to lose their jobs, by the way?
> 
> Merely my negative expectations of corporate behavior.

You're perhaps assuming the CentOS co-founders' technical job skills 
are economically useless for Red Hat, Inc.'s business operations outside
of the incarnation of CentOS that has existed up to now.  That could not
be further from the truth.  Their experience at maintaining CentOS as an
RHEL rebuild and recompile is directly usable in other RHAT (Red Hat,
Inc., I mean, that being their stock symbol) efforts, _and_ don't forget
that CentOS itself isn't being terminated, just changed to a different
development model (CentOS Stream) that has displeased many outsiders.

> I am sure you know much more about such matter than myself.  But I have
> seen beside Rocky and Alma, a couple of other distributions that want
> to replace CentOS.  I think the others originated in Europe.
> 
> I hope your friend can keep Rocky ahead of the pack.

It's less a competition than a coalescing of mindshare.  When there's a 
stable effort that is putting out reliable, relatively good releases, 
over time that collects mindshare.  So, for example, Scientific Linux
started as an independent RHEL rebuild put out by Fermilab and a couple
of other high-energy physics labs to run on the labs' high-performance
computing (HPC) clusters, in "competition" to the other RHEL rebuilds,
but with some specialty rpms for HPC operations.

After CentOS had a bit of a track record, the sponsors of Scientific
Linux decided maintaining a full RHEL rebuild was too much work, when
they could instead change Scientific Linux to an add-on repo of
HPC-relevant extra RPMs that could be added into a CentOS installation,
so they made that switch.

Currently, Scientific Linux policy going forward is that they'll
be following CentOS Stream, but they are "closely evaluating the Linux
distribution landscape."[1]

My understanding is that maintaining an RHEL rebuild has more
complexities than it used to, because RHAT was oblige by Oracle's 
ongoing efforts to merely borrow and semi-proprietise its work to 
become less helpful to the outside community, e.g., a detailed source
patch history is no longer accessible outside the firm.  There are 
doubtles challenges, that I'm sure Greg and others discuss in their 
lectures on the subject, which you can find online if you are interested
and want to learn more.  (I'm backlogged, and cannot spare that time.)

[1] https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind2110&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS&P=11382