On 12/16/2020 12:09 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
On 12/14/20 10:54 AM, Yves Bellefeuille wrote:
The article states that CentOS will now be "upstream" of RHEL instead
of "downstream". This is strange to me. I never thought CentOS was
upstream or downstream of RHEL; I always thought it *was* RHEL --
perhaps a little delayed, but that's not the same as being "downstream".
CentOS has always been 'downstream' of RHEL. The CentOS team rebuilt
the source packages with the goal of getting as close as possible to
what RHEL shipped, but it has never been 100% identical. You can do
the same by pulling all of the package contents from git.centos.org
and build the sources in the correct order with the correct software
and the correct options to rpmbuild. Building from git.centos.org is
not really hard at all; what is hard is figuring out the order and
figuring out the other bits you might need that aren't necessarily on
git.centos.org. Building from git is documented at
https://wiki.centos.org/Sources?highlight=(git.centos.org) and you can
look at an example of how I rebuilt a CentOS 8 RPM to get a
non-distributed subpackage rebuilt at
https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=73376&p=314200#p314200
CentOS has never *been* actual RHEL.
It's also clear that Red Hat didn't understand the importance of the
10-year support period.
If they didn't understand it, they wouldn't offer it for RHEL. They
just believe that if you need that you should pay something for it.
Yes and no. Yes, in a sense that RedHat always meticulously followed
requirements of GPL, and was putting sources of their "derivative" work
of backporting as srpms. And "paid" meant putting effort into correctly
rebuilding everything, so yes, what we used (roughly called "binary
replica" if RHEL) in fact was paid by downstream vendors' efforts.
No, in a sense, RedHat never had, and shouldn't have been expecting
being paid for just following GPL letter and having source RPMs freely
available. A always praised them for always following GPL.
With utmost respect,
And fully agreeing with the rest of your post,
Valeri
A 10-year support lifespan, even doing a straight rebuild of the
packages from RHEL, has a huge cost, and someone has to pay those
costs. Should Red Hat's paying customer base subsidize those costs?
(if you say 'Red Hat should pay for it' that actually means you think
Red Hat's paying customers should pay for it, because that's where Red
Hat's money comes from). In the case of Oracle Linux, Oracle has
decided that yes, their paying support customers should subsidize the
cost for those who aren't paying. Someone, somewhere, must pay the
costs; in a volunteer project the volunteers typically pay the labor
cost themselves, and in many cases pay the cost of the compute
hardware, bandwidth, and electricity required; these are not small
costs, and someone, somewhere, must pay them. If the costs aren't
adequately covered, the project's deliverables suffer, and users
complain.
It really just boils down to a cost without a tangible return on
investment. It remains to be seen if the intangible ROI was as large
as the vocal reaction to the transition announcement would imply.
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