Re: [PLUG] CentOS

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 2:32 PM Joe Rosato <rosatoj@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In short I think Stewardship + Time = ownership. Not said outright, but that is what has been happening here no? Don't allow the free option to gain revenue...
>

Most of the stuff that makes up RHEL is FOSS (and hence the reason
CentOS was a thing).  It still is.

However, running ANY distro is a lot of work, and my understanding is
that RHEL is more about providing an LTS platform that is highly
supported.  You can't just replicate that by forking a github repo.
You basically have to monitor everything RHEL does and then do the
same, sans anything proprietary they layer on top.  It isn't a ton of
work, but it isn't particularly interesting work if you aren't being
paid to do it.

The business model for commercial FOSS projects is that you pay for
the boring stuff.  The exciting stuff you can get for free anywhere,
because that's what all the kids in college want to work on.  The part
where it can talk to your ERP or whatever from 2003 and the same
binary runs for a decade without any need to modify config files is
the boring part.  The service manager might have changed 3 times in 20
years, but your shell script that starts/stops everything still runs
because of 14 layers of wrappers provided by the distro.  Python 2 had
an EOL announced a year after you licensed the OS, but the vendor is
going to keep it alive with backports for the promised OS EOL,
including all the libraries they packaged.

There are arguments against embracing this model for sure, but that is
the model they sell and you're not going to get it from most volunteer
operations.

You also get a lot of enterprise-oriented bundling.  If you want to
buy a commercially-supported framework around something like k8s,
Ceph, OpenStack, whatever, chances are you can get it with
certifications to work with RHEL.  You can get hardware certified to
run it.  That makes it all a bit more turnkey, though you're going to
pay for that convenience.  I was looking at the Ceph docs and they
have pointers to entire racks of server hardware pre-specified for
various use cases that they recommend.  That stuff is pretty expensive
(though cheaper than most competitors in that space), and you can
basically get something that works out of the box that way.  Plus if
you stay in the lines chances are all the vendors will be testing
their updates, and when stuff gets outdated you'll have a defined
upgrade path.  That is what companies want - something that just works
with a clear supported upgrade path, EOLs for budgeting, and so on.

-- 
Rich
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