CentOS dead

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Right on the same day as Patch Tuesday CentOS and RedHat notified everyone that they are shutting down CentOS. What is disturbing about this is how EA
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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I used it in the past to run some weather-related stuff, although for a while I moved them to RHEL, and I can now run them on macOS if need be.

What do people who used CentOS (I know some hosting firms who used it) do now? Move onto RHEL?

Nathan Parker

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Looks like they are trying to build something similar.  Either move to Ubuntu or something else?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Nathan Parker

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If the foundation is sound then support it!, but people may not be able to wait.

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There was an article about this in The Register. CentOS isn’t dead as much as it is changing focus, from a fully compatible version of RHEL, minus the support from Red Hat, to an upstream version, where CentOS users will effectively be beta testing the OS for the benefit of their paying enterprise customers. (I know I’ve heard that strategy before, but what could it be?)

(Canonical liked this message.)

Immediately, the founder of CentOS announced that Rocky Linux will be the new CentOS, a completely compatible version of RHEL, minus the support from Red Hat, just as CentOS once was.

Looks like the people who were suspicious of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat were right. Despite investing all that cash in open source, they still can’t bring themselves to believe that you can “give away” the product and still make money with it. They evidently still don’t “get” open source. Even Microsoft seems to be willing to move beyond their “Linux is cancer” past, but let’s not forget that when Microsoft was young and scrappy, IBM was already big, old, and incredibly stodgy and slow to see what seems obvious to everyone else. It’s how they ended up losing the IBM PC market they invented, and losing again to MS in the OS market.

One would think that all of that misfortune, IBM would either have to adapt or die, but it looks like they’ve not done much adaptation. I’d have to think that having CentOS around was a net plus for RHEL, and would naturally attract potential customers to try it out for free and see how it goes, and for those customers to then decide that with a little official support, this thing could really work… but now they’ve gone and done this, and if they think it will drive the former CentOS users into the loving but costly arms of RHEL, I would advise them to prepare for disappointment. This development proves that Red Hat in the IBM era cannot be trusted, and if you look at the comments in the Reg stories, it looks like Canonical is going to be the beneficiary. Even if IBM wises up enough to see what’s happening, you can’t unring that bell.

 

 

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AlexEiffel, fk5353, JohnW, Nathan Parker, Norio, lurks about, doriel, BATcher

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Thats quite suprising and non-standard – to end it so many years earlier.
For us, only PowerChute 4.2 runs on CentOS. Wonder how this will affect us, or can I stay with CentOS unsupported? What is your opinion please, how you will adapt to this change?

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Which version of CentOS? From what I have read, 7 will still be fine until its previously planned EOL date, while 8 will be cut off much earlier than intended.

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Nathan Parker

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Seems like we are lucky, its a 7 installed in 2018. So it should be OK?

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Yeah, 7 will be supported until 2024. 8 is the one that had its legs cut out from under it and will be EOL at the end of next year.

 

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doriel, Nathan Parker

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[fk5353]

We run a fair number of servers on CentOS/RHEL. Both are very solid Linux implementations. But unlike Microsoft, if they do something we don’t like, there are alternatives. If it reaches a point where they don’t meet our needs, there is no doubt we will be able to find something which does and make the transition with little or no drama.

By and large, the vast majority of the anger is coming from the fact that RedHat did not keep their promises to the community.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by fk5353.

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RTEsysadmin, Nathan Parker

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There are lots of comments about this on the CentOS mailing lists and on Ars Technica. People are not happy. Red Hat’s credibility has been severely damaged. I’m not sure users will return to CentOS even if Red Hat acknowledges its mistake.

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We can see, that people are not that sensitive. Look how many mistakes is Microsoft making and still, people just wont leave and install Linux distro or iOS. I think People will move away from CentOS version 8, but in the future, everything will be fine with RedHat. Sytems can run even after EOS still.

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A large part of the reason for that is the mammoth investment the entire world made in Windows long ago. For many business purposes, Windows has a captive audience. The movement of applications to the internet has alleviated that problem to a degree, but there are simply too many proprietary applications that don’t run on anything but Windows and too many people who are trained on Windows to abandon it any time soon.

Group K(ill me now)

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AlexEiffel

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Dumb move by IBM’s bean counters. CentOS served many as a poor man’s RHEL. If you were willing to get your hands dirty it was fairly straightforward to set up. For those who needed a reliable option and had no money it made a lot of sense. Another question, if CentOS is becoming testing version for RHEL what happens to Fedora?

As noted by others, Linux switching server distros is somewhat a pain but not something a competent Linux admin or many skilled users would be scared of doing. Debina and Ubuntu have serve versions and are very popular.

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Nathan Parker

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[fk5353]

The new RedHat rules of engagement:

Fedora is the beta version of major releases, V7, V8, V9 and so on.

CentOS Stream is the beta version of Vx.0, Vx.1, Vx.2 and so on.

CentOS users relied on the fact that it was always binary compatible with RHEL Vx.y. Now the only guarantee is it is binary compatible with Vx.

What REALLY angered people was the change in EOL for CentOS 8 from 2029 to 2021. That pulled the rug out from under a lot of people’s plans and results in a lot of wasted time, effort and money. Many were in the planning and implementation stages of going to C8. Some had even completed the transition. Now they have a year to figure out where they go from here.

For those not familiar with Linux going from CentOS V7 to CentOS V8 is akin to going from Windows 7 to Windows 10. A REALLY BIG DEAL and not a trivial project.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by fk5353. Reason: Add Windows analogy

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doriel, Nathan Parker

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Sheesh, a recent software project recommended CentOS for their database analysis tool, but the trouble I had just creating a Red Hat account to download it, etc. I’m glad I turned to Ubuntu and told the vendor to deal with supporting that install.

No matter where you go, there you are.

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RTEsysadmin, Nathan Parker

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You need an account to download RHEL,  but you do not need any sort of account to download CentOS.

 

 

 

 

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This is depressing.When IBM paid so much for Red Hat, I had hope they would invest to get at Microsoft with a viable desktop offensive and a great stable server OS in opposition to this crazy world of constant distracting change we are stuck in. This risks putting them on a very slow path toward SCO Unix extinction, as they are not the only Windows in town. Canonical sure could benefit from this in the long run. Angered techies can be powerful and act according to their principles, they are not your average consumer.

With my team, over many years, we built an incredibly powerful ecosystem as a mix of third-party software and in-house development. All of this hold very well together because we use a stable foundation (third-party software included), so we don’t need to spend much time on maintenance. Having to adapt to constantly changing software is not efficient at all for us on a productivity level, as it hinders our ability to use our resources on further developing our ecosystem, spending our time maintaining compatibility between all the tools for changes that most of the time don’t bring much value.

I got a hint that IBM wasn’t going to play nice a few weeks ago when one of my suppliers said he had issues with CentOS or Red Hat because, if my memory serves me well, a raid driver for a piece of hardware that was still very common was dropped from support on newer versions and he had to use this new version.

This looked to me like a huge departure from the ideal that I always cherished: a stable operating system that has few bugs triggered and can run for years undisturbed so we can focus on real value adding activities, not pocket filling activities for others.

So, now one has to hope that there will be a need important enough to gather resources and a following around the other open source project that still believes in this ideal. According to the article from the Register linked by Ascaris, almost one out of five Linux web servers uses CentOS. That is not minor. And when all companies need to fork money to big companies for no added value, everyone in the chain pays and it gets added to their costs, factored in their profit margins at each step until it reaches the final consumer. Not many people are winning at this and in the long run, if you are not a monopoly like Microsoft, I am not sure you will win either.

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