143 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
143 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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date: 2014-01-08
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title: RHEL and CentOS joining forces
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category: Opinions
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featured_image: https://i.imgur.com/3colCNj.png
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---
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Yesterday saw probably the biggest FLOSS news in recent times. Certainly
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the biggest news of 2014 so far :-) By some freak of overloaded RSS
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readers, I missed the announcement, but I did see this:
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>
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Day 1 at the new job. Important stuff first.. Where do I get my Red Hat
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?
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</p>
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--- Karanbir Singh (\@CentOS) January 8, 2014
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</blockquote>
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<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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<!-- more -->
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It did not take long to dig up
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[this](https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/?utm_content=buffer6403d&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer)
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and
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[this](https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-January/020100.html),
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where Red Hat and CentOS respectively announce that they have joined
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forces. Some things from the announcement struck me:
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> Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL
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That is important! This says to me that Red Hat see the value of CentOS
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as an entity in itself. By not linking the CentOS developers to RHEL in
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anyway, they are not going to be side-tracking them. Instead, they are
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simple freeing them up to work more effectively on CentOS.
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> we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams
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QA was always a problem for CentOS, simply because it took place
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effectively in secret. Now they can just walk down the corridor to talk
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to the lawyers who would have previously (potentially) sued them, all
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the potential problems go away.
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# The RHEL Ecosystem
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In the beginning there is [Fedora](https://fedoraproject.org)), where
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the RHEL developers get to play. Here is where they can try new things
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and make mistakes. In Fedora things can break without people really
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worrying (especially in Rawhide). The exception to this is my wife as we
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run it on the family PC and she gets quite frustrated with its foibles.
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However, she knew she was marrying a geek from the outset, so I will not
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accept any blame for this.
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Periodically, the the Fedora developers will pull everything together
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and create a release that has the potential to be transformed into RHEL.
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Here they pull together all the things that have be learnt over the last
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few releases. I consider this an Alpha release of RHEL. At this point,
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behind the scenes, the RHEL developers will take those packages and
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start work on the next release of RHEL.
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{% pullquote %} On release of RHEL, Red Hat make the source code
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available, as required by the terms of the GPL (and other relevant
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licenses).The thing is, {\"Red Hat as a company are built on Open
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Source\"} principles, they firmly believe in them and, best of all, they
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practise what the preach. They would still be within the letter of the
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law if the just dumped a bunch of apparently random scripts on a web
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server. Instead, they publish the SRPM packages used to build RHEL. {%
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endpullquote %}
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CentOS then take these sources and get to work. By definition they are
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always beind RHEL. As many know this got pretty bad at one point:
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{% img <https://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/~matt/centos-delays.jpg>
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center %}
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(Thanks to Matt Simmons, aka [Standalone
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Sysadmin](https://www.standalone-sysadmin.com), from whom I blatantly
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stole that graph, I'll ask permission later)
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Since then, things have got better, with new point releases coming hot
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on the heels of RHEL. Certainly preparations for EL7 seemed to be going
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on nicely even before this announcement.
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# how does this now affect the two projects
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Both CentOS and Red Hat have a lot to gain from this alliance. <img
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src='https://i.imgur.com/qbKvXko.jpg' class='image-process-article-image' />I am sure that there
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are few people in the wider community who will be upset, but I think
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that it is a good thing. The reality is that CentOS and RHEL have never
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been enemies. The people that are using CentOS are just simply never
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going to pay Red Hat for support they do not need.
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When I started at Snell (then Snell & Wilcox), the official line was to
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use RHEL for all our Linux servers. They had everything paid up for a
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couple of years at the time. By the time renewal came around the global
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financial crisis had hit, we had used the support two or three times and
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each time I had solved the problem before Red Hat answered the ticket.
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So, we decided to switch to CentOS (which was trivial).
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At the other end of the scale you have the web-scale people. For them,
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paying Red Hat for support is both unnecessary (they have the right
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people on staff) and prohibitively expensive. When you have tens of
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thousands of nodes you cannot use a licensing model that support each
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one.
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In the cloud model you also have a problem, in that you are effectively
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renting an OS. Microsoft and Red Hat you have an administrative overhead
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of ensuring you have the right licenses available. In my experience Red
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Hat make it a lot easier, but it is an overhead none the less.
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All three of these will get a huge benefit. Now that the CentOS
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developers are on staff at Red Hat they have direct access to the source
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code. There should no longer be any need to wait for RHEL to drop before
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they start building. Red Hat will be supplying infrastructure and
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community support, which will also be a massive bonus.
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So what do Red Hat gain? In terms of new customers, they may get some of
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that first group. These are the people that may well do their testing
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with CentOS, but may now choose to go production with RHEL. I certainly
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would be more willing to now that XFS is not in a separate (expensive)
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RAN channel. I do not see the cloud or web-scale people changing to a
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paid support model. It will remain prohibitively expensive for them.
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I think they biggest thing that Red Hat will gain is that get to give
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Oracle a good kicking. Oracle basically do the same thing as CentOS, but
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they stick a thumping great big support charge on it. To be honest I
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have never really worked out why anyone would use it. Yes they are
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cheaper than Red Hat, but not by much. A couple of years ago Red Hat
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took steps to [make life
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harder](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/red_hat_twarts_oracle_and_novell_with_change_to_source_code_packaging/).
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That had an unfortunate knock-on effect on CentOS, causing the huge
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delay in CentOS 6. Now CentOS should not have that problem as they are
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closer to source.
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TL;DR
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-----
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CentOS and RHEL joining forces is in my opinion a really good thing,
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with both parties getting significant benefits. Granted they are bit
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less tangible for Red Hat, but that does not make them any less
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significant.
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Personally I am really excited to see what it is in store - especially
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from CentOS. I even have a couple of SIG ideas too.
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