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Red Hat To Help Develop CentOS
An anonymous reader writes with news that Red Hat and the CentOS project are "joining forces" to develop the next version of CentOS. For years, CentOS has been a popular choice for users who want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without having to pay for it. Some of the CentOS developers are moving to Red Hat, but they won't be working on RHEL — they say the "firewall" between the two distros will remain in place. CentOS Project Chair Karanbir Singh said, 'The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted, proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner on the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone to come along and participate.'
Those of us who've been using Centos understand that if you use it to deploy, and ultimately in your data center, often in place of Windows, then it is just a matter of time before you begin to use RHEL to get support for at least their mission critical production boxes. Centos and RHEL are a nice mix. So, this definitely makes sense for RH. Plus, they have nothing to lose since Centos thrives with or without their endoresment.
Yet, the back and forth relationship RH has taken over the years with the community-driven open source from which it was born and has built its business suggests that, despite this move, they only seem to consider relationships that produce pofits from no more than one degree of separation. This makes the end to this very long estrangement, where Centos only referred to Redhat as the "upstream provider" to keep RedHat's trademark legal team at bay, just plain-old WEIRD.
The question is, how will RH help Centos? That isn't very clear from this announcement.
That's what I was thinking. You have Centos in production, but now decide you want RHEL support. Why should you have to choose between reinstalling your production environment, or just giving RHEL their money and being done with it? I suspect that RH will remove this barrier to paying or support by offering support for Centos.
I have had occasion to run into a kernel bug (back when AMD64 was still a new adventure) and, due to being at a large organization that regularly paid Red Hat various sums of cash, was put in direct contact with high level support. I provided them with my analysis of what was apparently going wrong and a C program to reproduce the failure in a short time (otherwise it would only occur naturally after a system had been running jobs for several weeks to months). Within a day or two they sent back a custom patched kernel that fixed the issue, and later rolled that fix out generally in the next update release (though, admittedly, that second part took quite some time). I might be a competent programmer but diagnosing and fixing a fundamental problem in the kernel and then being on the hook if it has undesirable side-effects isn't something I'd want to do myself, nor could I expect such a rapid answer from the community for what was basically a small corner-case problem, but one that was affecting our business. Having the support is what made the difference.
Of course, for many cases, self support and community support can be good enough, but all it takes is one major issue where you can't solve the problem and you're losing revenue and reputation, and all the sudden that "expensive" support starts to look really cheap in comparison.
And I also agree, stay far far away from Oracle Linux if at all possible (heck stay away from Oracle altogether if you can, but that's frequently impractical).