I have no illusions that this message is going to change anything at
Red
Hat.
It's not really for us as community members to identify a business path and that is a
convenience factor that we typically rely upon to work on things that begin as
experimental and a learning path only to grow into something more reliable and
service-ready.
First a bit of background. I came to Red Hat via the Cygnus
acquisition. My combined service spanned nearly 30 years. During that
time I had the opportunity to be involved in the formation of Fedora,
strategic planning for RHEL while at the same time being able to spend
much of my time on optimizing compilers.
Thank you for your contributions over the years and for continuing to do work at such a
low level. It helps the rest of us stay focused on delivering a great experience to users
knowing that the subsystems we rely upon are not going to fail us and that they deliver
the best performance possible.
--
What Red Hat has done recently is depressing, but not a huge surprise to
me. Red Hat struggled repeatedly with how to deal with "the clones".
[.
. .]
Arguments for protecting the bits were
met with something like "if that's what we need to do to be successful,
then we're failing to provide real value".
I disagree that this is "protecting the bits. The bits are equally available to all
and that's how we do what we do in this Fedora community. I see it as more of a hard
nudge from the comfortable nest of a basic rebuild to determine a pathway forward as a
clone. This is not a bad time to do it. As we move towards more immutable systems and the
use of container-based workloads in production - it's time to ask after whether or not
we should deemphasize these paths forward. This probably sounds bizarre coming from
someone who works hard to preserve the cloud edition experience side by side with the
immutable FCOS and IOT editions, but I recognize that there are places for both and that
the sun will eventually set.
Furthermore, the CentOS Stream process is stabilizing and consistent with the goals of the
community. I was at devconf.cz recently and I sat down with Tomas and Nikolas from the
Packit team to really dig in to how I can make packit and copr work for more rapid
development and how I can ensure that my builds are consistent with the goals of both the
upstream and downstream communities.
In my experience with the CentOS community, I have spent countless hours helping users
taint the very kernel they declare they want to preserve to get the results that are
already built into the CentOS Stream experience. I think, just like Mike McGrath and
probably a lot of people, that this is the best code base to expose and that we should be,
as a community, determining how to roll forward. Sure there will be requirements for
freezing support, but there are mechanisms for this already - os-build will give you a
resource for experimentation. There are package manifests to ensure consistency between
states, but just generally, users push forward with the systems they don't purchase
support to run. I am not saying there aren't reasons to freeze updates, etc. There
are, but as CentOS Stream _is_ RHEL in it's next form it is also representative of
where RH would like the community to be. If we as a community care about our evolution,
then the clones should care about it as well. If Red
Hat as a sponsor identifies that the bar is better set at CentOS Stream it is more a
statement on where they believe that CI/CD and Quality Engineering has set the bar for
user stability.
Back in 2002 or 2003 when we were trying to figure out how to salvage
the ill-fated "Red Hat Community Linux Project" resulting in what we now
know as Fedora, one of the key concepts that we pushed to the
executive team at Red Hat was that it was strategically important for
both Fedora
Exactly! And projects like Fedora ELN that Stephen Gallagher, et. al., have dedicated
themselves to supporting are only bringing it closer.
I've been a Fedora user since before FC1. I run Fedora on my
laptop.
I was not as much a part of the division as you were, but I was there as a community
member and contributor. I was out in the field though, putting it on systems that replaced
routing for T1 lines with Fractional T1s and DSL that eventually turned my business users
into Red Hat customers. I get the appeal of a strong union between the two.
That will change across the board this summer.
[. . .]
I don't see the change, on the contrary, I see a more unified community rallying
around the special interests of the clones similar to the way the Hyperscale SIG unifies
the more advanced requirements of fail-only architectures in CentOS Stream right now.
Those same contributors to the Hyperscale SIG are also supporting work on Fedora Asahi and
Fedora ELN just as fast! ( I am looking at you Davide and Neal). I am betting on the
community to welcome the clones and help them find their dividing lines as well as accept
their fixes and assist them in their CI and validations. This Red Hat decision didn't
exclude the clones, it just made the fact that the bar has been set higher for community
participation a more clearly defined action IMO.
I'll still have to deal with the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora ecosystem on a
professional level. Obviously, I'll do what I need to do to help make
my employer successful -- but when a choice exists, Fedora/CentOS/RHEL
won't be where I land going forward.
So I am terribly surprised by the statement that you won't be coming with us. I see
you as someone who could really help the clones be a part of the community and help them
navigate the early introduction into the CentOS Stream and ELN communities. If you ever
decide to return as a Fedora/CentOS/RHEL user for your own reward, I'll be in the line
that welcomes you back and looks forward to your help.
--
David Duncan