[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: No more CentOS as an LTS release

[Beddingfield, Allen]

Most people I know view it as "free Red Hat without support".  Now the free option has been removed for the exact same thing.  I think most of those people will peel off to Oracle's free Linux offering, or move over to openSUSE Leap or Ubuntu LTS.  
We are almost 100% a SUSE shop, and to avoid paying for physical server licenses, we've started putting openSUSE Leap (it is to SLES what CentOS is/was to RHEL) on them.  We just do the blanket virtualization host licenses with support for VMs.  We have a few things around that require RHEL, which are on CentOS.  I'll be moving them to OEL.
Allen B.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu


________________________________________
From: Scott McBrien <smcbrien at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 8, 2020 5:26 PM
To: Jim Kinney; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Cc: Beddingfield, Allen
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [ale] No more CentOS as an LTS release

Actually this had nothing to do with IBM.  Red Hat, working with the CentOS Board had been looking at how to change CentOS Linux for a while.  Red Hat still operates largely independently of IBM.

Red Hat agreed to acquire the CentOS Project because it needed funding and structure and a lot of Red Hat product developers, like those working on OpenStack, used CentOS Linux because getting RHEL was difficult.  Red Hat created the Developer Subscription program, which essentially provides developers a zero-cost way of getting a variety of Red Hat products including RHEL and OpenShift.

Additionally, with CentOS Linux where it’s positioned as a downstream, in order to get a problem resolved, one had to get the update included in Fedora.  Then convince the RHEL maintainer to pull the update into RHEL, then wait for the RHEL release at which time the updated package could be built for CentOS Linux.  Or, alternatively, you pulled the source, applied your update, then compiled, installed, and maintained this package for the duration of your environment.  With stream you can make direct PRs and the workflow for merging a change to CentOS Stream is much more sane.  This benefits project contributors like Facebook and some National Labs.

-Scott

On Dec 8, 2020, at 5:17 PM, Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

That certainly tosses sand in the gears. Thank you IBM.

Granted most people use centos as an upstream dev setup anyway but the loss of a lts release will be a huge mess.

On December 8, 2020 3:48:11 PM EST, "Beddingfield, Allen via Ale" <ale at ale.org> wrote:

Sounds like a good time for people to re-evaluate, and move to openSUSE Leap (or Ubuntu LTS or OEL if you are into that sort of thing lol)

https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/centos-linux-8-will-end-in-2021-and-shifts-focus-to-centos-stream/

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu
________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

--
Computers amplify human error
Super computers are really cool_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo