Excellent vid explaining the importance of CentOS Stream!

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Thanks!

Greetings Andrew! This video is on the same subject that brought me to you channel over a year ago. I have then been a fan of your videos ever since! You do a great job at explaining tech subjects and providing an understanding on things from as many perspectives as possible. But I feel you and many others in the linux community still have a miss understanding of what really happened behind closed doors between Red Hat and CentOS. And by CentOS, I mean the organization leading the project (the board of directors ), not the operating system. I agree with almost all of your statements on this video, and I think you really drove the most important points on this whole CentOS/CentOS Stream story starting at the 7:16 timestamp and on. One thing I strongly disagree is based on your statement at the very beginning of the video: "....Red Hat infamously killed off CentOS...." This statement puts all accountability on Red Hat. A major factor being missed here - and not that I agree this was a good thing - is that at one point in time, CentOS (the organization) became too reliant on Red Hat as a corporate contributor to the project. When Red Hat decided to change course on their contributions, Red Hat presented their new business plan to the board of directors, and perhaps you may say that the CentOS board of directors looked out for their best interest, not for the community's best interest. But then again, could they had been able to continue the CentOS project without Red Hat's contribution? Probably not. The CentOS project was in fact being supported by the community and some other organizations, but none of them invested as much effort and resources in the CentOS project as Red Hat did. From an enterprise business perspective, Red Hat needed to align their resources to a development focus project (CentOS Stream), which you did a great job explaining on this video. Also, the decision to change the EOL on CentOS 8 was not all of Red Hat's decision. Were there any CentOS board members in the Red Hat payroll? Yes, 4 out of 11 board members were actual Red Hat employees, however, the decision was unanimous! And while not much can be shared of what happened behind closed doors in the meetings leading to this decision, Red Hat's intentions were not "kill off CentOS 8" , their plan was to just no longer support ($$$) the CentOS project and to now move their resources to the CentOS Stream project, which led to several changes in the Red Hat / CentOS business relationship. Anyhow, I do not blame the linux community for being mad at Red Hat, I believe there was a lot of lack of communication and misunderstandings between Red Hat, CentOS and the community. But I also do not blame Red Hat for changing their enterprise business objectives. I believe the foundation upon which the CentOS organization was built on, was faulty from the beginning. This why I have also become a great fan of Rocky Linux and what Greg Kurtzer has done in order to avoid something like this from happening again. I really believe Rocky Linux is going to be a great REAL community based enterprise focused distribution,... well,, I really hope! :) Best wishes mate! And thank you for all the hard work on your videos!

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Alexy. I appreciate the detailed comment. I feel that the responsibility lies primarily with Red Hat. At the time Red Hat held a mandatory majority presence on the CentOS board, so whatever Red Hat decided said was effectively law. The mandatory majority rule was revoked in Aug 2021 so I assume you were looking at the current board when you said 4/11? Red Hat also owned the CentOS trademarks, and they provided the funding and most of the developers. Although the CentOS board voted, the decision had been already been made. The non-Red Hat board members could have voted against it in protest, but it wouldn't have achieved anything other than shooting themselves in the foot. If by some miracle the Red Hat board members voted against Red Hat’s wishes they’d still have lost their funding and contributors, and Red Hat had warned them of liability issues. I can understand them choosing not to die on that hill.

@alexycox1347

Жыл бұрын

@@ProTechShow Well, I still disagree. What's that old movie quote? "Follow the money" LOL. I believe CentOS became to attached to Red Hat's internets, but I do not blame Red Hat. They are a for profit organization. One thing I do agree on 100%, is that Red Hat should had definitely rebranded their development project and not had called it CentOS Stream! Best wishes mate! Looking forward to your next videos!

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Cheers!

Great Andrew 👌🙂 Useful information.. keep rocking

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Thanks 🙂

Nice to see a video explaining what Stream's benefits are rather than focusing on purely the downsides or the larger drama

@ProTechShow

8 ай бұрын

Thanks. Although I haven't impressed by the way Red Hat has handled things it can be easy to lose sight of the good bits amongst the drama. It will be interesting to see how Red Hat's more recent source code restrictions and the inception of OpenELA changes things in the future. If further wedges are driven between RHEL and the wider community we could see OpenELA emerge as an upstream source for a parallel Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

Very precise and informative :-) Liked and Subscribed. Keep them coming.

@ProTechShow

6 ай бұрын

Thanks 🙂

Amazing video! We need an update of this after the RH drama. 😅

@ProTechShow

2 ай бұрын

Thanks! I have a more recent video about the history of Enterprise Linux. It covers up to the present day with the Red Hat changes and formation of OpenELA: kzread.info/dash/bejne/Z4yZys2aZKmylMY.html Or if that's too serious and you'd prefer to see me take the piss, there's this: kzread.info/dash/bejne/p6VqpKx8kc7IpKQ.html

@davidhiguera3078

2 ай бұрын

@@ProTechShow just binged those videos, I loved the history of Enterprise Linux. Now Im happier of using Fedora on the laptop and rocky on my home server, knowing the ups and downs they went over. Awesome content my friend!!

@ProTechShow

2 ай бұрын

Cheers 🙂

Appreciate you explaining this.

@ProTechShow

9 ай бұрын

Thanks! It'll be interesting to see how things play out. It seems Red Hat has a bit of work to do on the processes for accepting contributions to Stream. AlmaLinux's first bugfix submission wasn't the smoothest but got there in the end.

Thanks, very informational

@ProTechShow

4 ай бұрын

Thanks 🙂

So, I think if there is any bug, it will be fixed in centos stream before redhat because rocky and lama linux have to report the bug to centos stream community and be fixed before redhat by centos stream community right?

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Mostly, yes. Although the community can contribute to CentOS Stream, it is maintained by Red Hat as something of a live view of RHEL development. In most cases you're correct - the bugs will first be fixed in CentOS Stream and it acts as a bit of further proving in the community before the fixes make their way into RHEL. There is an exception for security bugs. Red Hat will release security fixes to RHEL first so that paying customers get the fastest protection (they don't want someone reverse-engineering security fixes in CentOS Stream before they're in RHEL and using them against their customers).

@maherkhalil007

Жыл бұрын

@@ProTechShow looks great

Stream is godsend for the desktop.

Are you sure that this is the actual path? because centos stream faq says otherwise. 11. Why is $package newer in RHEL than CentOS Stream? CentOS Stream is a work in progress. At a future milestone, users can expect CentOS Stream content will include content intended for inclusion in the next RHEL minor release. In some cases, however, Red Hat is obligated to release fixes to customers first, after which these fixes can be released into CentOS Stream.

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

In a general sense, yes; CentOS Stream tracks ahead of RHEL and gets updates sooner. There is an exception for security fixes so Red Hat can make sure their paying customers are protected, and that is what this point is referring to. It wouldn't look good if they released a security fix in Stream only to have it reverse-engineered and exploited before they'd rolled it out to RHEL customers so those are treated a little differently. It's explained a bit more in Q4 of this FAQ: www.centos.org/distro-faq/

@zeyadkenawi8268

Жыл бұрын

@@ProTechShow Aha gotcha thanks for the explanation.

Well presented video. The only thing it leaves me concerned about is "oh dear, Stream has become a single point of failure / weakness in the development chain, hasn't it?"

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Not any more so that RHEL. Stream is essentially Red Hat's existing internal development, but exposed to the community so other people can join in. The only way Stream fails is if RHEL itself fails (or Red Hat discontinue it). It's not dependent on people's good graces in the same way that true community efforts are. Anyone who pays for RHEL is paying for the development of Stream. It would make more sense if they had called it "Red Hat Stream" rather than "CentOS", but I guess they wanted it to inherit the sense of "free" and "community" that was associated with the CentOS name.

I think you are the only person who can show the positives of CentOS Stream, most are still angry at Red Hat's attitude, myself included. But your point of view makes a lot of sense, so I'll lower my animosity, even in my company we're already migrating to Oracle Linux. We had many VMs with CentOS and also many with RHEL, now we are going to migrate CentOS to Oracle Linux and I don't know what will happen with RHEL, maybe some can be migrated to Oracle too along with paid support.

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Thanks. I understand the anger. If Red Hat had said "CentOS 8 will be the last release" and left it at that I think things would be different. It would be disappointing, but understandable. Pulling the rug 2 years in after encouraging people to use it and promising 10 years of support felt like a betrayal. I wanted to make this video because I feel that Stream was in isolation a good idea, but got thrown under the bus to try and deflect anger around CentOS. As a result many people only ever hear about Stream in the context of "Stream isn't CentOS" (a message I've shared myself); but it should never really have been put in the position of trying to be CentOS in the first place. Taken as just "CentOS Stream" rather than "CentOS replacement" it has a lot of benefits… but the use case is definitely different.

why not just settle for ubuntu lts? long time support, large company backing. and it can still be used on desktop

@ProTechShow

10 ай бұрын

Red Hat "gets" enterprise. They do a good job of supporting packages for a long time, backporting fixes after the author moved on, and keeping it going for a full 10 years within minimal change. That's great for long-term stability. They don't try and foist half-broken Snap packages on you which IMO have no place on a server. I've found on a few occasions when looking to resolve a (non-critical) vulnerability that Canonical were happy to wait for someone to fix it upstream in Debian, whereas with Red Hat "the buck stops here", so they crack on with it. There's also a fair bit of personal preference e.g. I find the package management simpler i.e. "dnf upgrade" instead of "apt update/upgrade/dist-upgrade" (and you don't need to worry whether it's a Deb or a Snap), the difference between server/desktop is just package selection. Mostly, though: I'm just more familiar with it. When I started using servers, Red Hat was a tool for enterprise and Ubuntu was a toy for your laptop. That comparison is no longer fair, but I haven't found a compelling reason to switch... although recent events are making me reconsider that. There's too much drama with Red Hat these days and they're burning community goodwill at an alarming rate, so I may well start looking more closely at Ubuntu or SUSE.

Tbh ot was kind of weord they allowed centos to exsist in the first place

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

It was a community thing originally and RHEL is open source (it's not like they wrote all of the code themselves, either) so as long as they didn't rip off a Red Hat trademark it was all fine and there was nothing they could do about it even if it bothered them (same as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux today). The only reason Red Hat was even able to kill it was that a while back they decided to support it and effectively bought (technically not "bought", other than the trademarks) the CentOS project by employing the developers and providing funding for it. When they cancelled it, what they really did is pull their people and funding away from CentOS Linux, which by this point left it pretty much dead in the water without them.

It's not looking so clever now...

@ProTechShow

10 ай бұрын

The current drama doesn't really have anything to do with CentOS Stream. It's about RHEL source code. CentOS Stream is still a very positive thing by its own merit. The problem is Red Hat seems determined to shoot themselves in both feet, blame the community, then hide behind CentOS Stream like that positive move means we should ignore the negative ones.

its o s not os lol

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

Never! 😆 Funny enough, I did talk to the original founder about the name and he said it's os (not o s), although it was originally intended to be pronounced like Mentos...

@galloe

Жыл бұрын

@@ProTechShow Exactly, Cent "O S" has never been the case. It's one of those gif pronunciation debacles (gif or jif?), so I'll stick to how Gregory Kurtzer originally intended to pronounce it and pronounce CentOS like Mentos. That being said, I will always say "jif" and nobody will ever change my mind about it, lol.

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

@@galloe you may have undermined your own position when you spelt it "jif"! 😆

@galloe

Жыл бұрын

@@ProTechShow The creator of GIF, Stephen Wilhite, was very clear about how it is pronounced, and that's with a soft G, as in "Jif." He even said that the Oxford dictionary is wrong for accepting both pronunciations, lol. From your point of view, Wilhite was undermining his own creation. Been pronouncing "Jif" since the 90s, and that's one hill I'm willing to die on.😃

@ProTechShow

Жыл бұрын

@@galloe Haha. He didn't create the word "Graphics" so he doesn't get to decide how to pronounce the "G". More importantly, when I was growing up Jif was a well-known cleaning brand that had been around since the 70s, so the softer sound has a pre-existing canonical spelling for me that some random bloke from America doesn't get to override. 😋

Yes, important and useless :)))

Companies that used CentOS for production purpose are not the one who wanted or had the talent to contribute back into RHEL. And those companies are mostly not IT companies, they have their own agenda and business to run, they don't want to contribute back either. They just want a stable OS - a free one that is enterprise level like CentOS was - to run their businesses with the least updates and hickups possible - and that's 80% of the companies who used CentOS. And CentOS Stream is not for those 80% and they are moving away from it. Again, history will show how IBM did a jerk move that in the end undermined themselves. Whoever still runs stuff on IBM's stack/hardware/storage in 2022 must be crazy or a mazochist. @9:56 This shows exacly why you must NOT used CentOS Steam AT ALL.