- This topic has 2 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated Feb 6-2:11 pm by Brian Masinick.
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ctcx
At least in the place I went for part time job, Centos was the distro used for servers.
Actually it was not bad, until the day they decided to kill it for good and replace it for the new “Stream” release.
At least as far as I understand, this “Stream” release turned Centos into kind of a “usable beta” instead of a purely stable release. Like many users, I didn’t like it too much.A while later, two new main RHEL “clones” appeared: AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. I read about both of them but put a bit more attention to the second one due to seemingly being by one of the original Centos founders.
After circa one year it looks good overall. However one detail got my attention:
https://rockylinux.org/sponsors/
Take a look at who are among the main sponsors…So I just wanted to try asking for a point of view here. Just like Ubuntu and the recent Mint thing, should I worry about that? Or am I being just a bit too paranoid?
Thanks everyone.
christophe
My thought is that the sponsors themselves will not destroy the distro. If I recall correctly, the centos debacle was because redhat bought it, then IBM bought redhat. Then, since IBM OWNED the distro, they decided to use it in a way that benefitted THEM, but wasn’t what the user base wanted. IBM must have expected a great success, but I suspect they have no one who wants to use centos as their testing-bed. They may have just wanted to destroy centos in their greed, since it was a free version of rhel.
So I figure that until Microsoft or Amazon or one of the other sponsors actually buys out the ownership of the distro, it should be OK. But even if it were to be bought by a big company, the owners should know that they wasted their money, if they buy the distro & do what IBM did — they would lose the user-base.
This is FOSS. Another one will take its place, right?
- This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by christophe.
confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019
Brian Masinick
As far as specific distributions go, as we know, they come and go.
A distribution closely related to antiX, MEPIS, was abandoned by the founder because he found good employment that consumed his time and energy since he was mainly a talented free-lance software developer.
CentOS was a Red Hat Linux derivative built directly from Red Hat source code. To this day you can build your Linux from that, or any other sources. IBM decided to take control of that source code base to use it for one or more internal projects. They didn’t stop making the source code available but they did purchase the binary code and therefore they purchased the right to it while leaving the source available according to the GPL.
In the case of MEPIS the community rebuilt it as MX Linux with a Xfce desktop environment and has since re-added KDE back in plus a Fluxbox alternative.
Red Hat, like Debian and Slackware, also has many offspring including Rocky Linux and many others. Of these I have no idea how many derived from CentOS and whatever tools they substitute for the Red Hat tools; we know that a community is capable of building a great variety of flavors and tools.
My opinion is that in the long run, having new community efforts keeps the overall infrastructure fresh.
Frankly I am expecting some fairly significant infrastructure changes in the overall Linux and/or OS environment that creates different things altogether. Android and iOS have done some alternatives to Linux and UNIX on top of the kernels already; we’re due, perhaps overdue for much more!
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Brian Masinick
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