this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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I disagree with you. You seem keen to insult people who might hold an alternative opinion, so no doubt you'll attack me as well.
Redhat did far more than just stymie Oracle. That you're saying that suggests you're either deliberately ignoring the facts (Ending CentOS 8 7 years early with no prior announcement, being massively disrespectful to the volunteer CentOS maintainers and support staff), deliberately paywalling source deliberately to target all rebuilders, not just Oracle, generally being amateurish and entitled dicks to the community through their official communications and so on) - or you simply don't know.
About the only thing you say that is correct, is that Redhat do contribute a lot to FOSS, even now. That deserves respect, but it gets harder to do that at a personal level each time they do something simultaneously dumb and selfishly corporate. A lot of people have given Redhat a lot of space and stayed quiet out of respect of their history. Maybe they are right to, but the direction they're heading doesn't look healthy to me.
Half of what you're writing isn't really true.
You're likely assuming a lot of that.
Everyone knows that Oracle was the reason. Sorry, but they basically bragged that they stole the latest rhel source code and added an unbreakable kernel. And they purposely targeted Redhats customers with support by stealing their work.
In other words, their only other choice was to basically close shop... Oracle has been screwing them for years,
Also, sorry, but is it disrespectful when a company drops a project? We could make that same comment about every project. Also, CentOS is open source, as you said, so anyone can download it . They didn't.
You're also likely assuming they're not pouring a huge amount of resources into it too
The perfect current example of rhel improving Linux is pipewire. They are literally unfucking Linux one component at a time in large chunks. It's insane that people here are treating them so badly.
In fact, the community has no problems mistreating Linux developers over tiny things, which is why developers like myself which have been badly attacked in the past have stopped contributing
'tis, you know.
Dropped a project? It wasn't actually their project. I think you're missing some history there. CentOS was a distro started by Greg and Rocky entirely separate from RHEL and ran for many years. Redhat took over CentOS through methods that may be seen as underhand until they had sufficient seats and influence over the Board to have control of it, and then they took/stole the CentOS name. CentOS Linux is an example of a FOSS project that got taken over by a corporate entity, and then killed. (Anyone heard of embrace, extend, extinguish before?) Now CentOS only exists as CentOS Stream, which is repositioned upstream of RHEL and is a staging area/testbed between Fedora and RHEL. Redhat say it's not suitable for production use, so nobody other than testers uses it, afaik.
To my eye, Red Hat’s “direction” has not changed since they formed the Fedora Project to begin with ( the first attempt at keeping RHEL and their “no cost” options distinct ). Attempt number two was the creation of CentOS Stream. Now it is the way they manage RHEL SRPMS. No change in direction. No change in intent. No overall change in their behaviour.