I used the term "dead". SL7 (and earlier?) is still active. By dead, I
did not mean SL 7, I meant SL in general for the future. As I
understand the situation, Fermilab/CERN (and thus the HEP community upon
which many of us are "piggybacking" -- not freeloading if one is paying
taxes to a government that is providing funding to Fermilab or CERN) has
abandoned SL going forward -- NO SL 8, but Fermilab/CERN will be using
CentOS 8 (with modifications? I do not know). CentOS is a RedHat
subsidiary, and RedHat is fully owned by IBM. Thus, one must depend
upon the good will (profit motive?) of IBM to provide a viable CentOS 8
that may be competing with the for-profit RHEL 8 of IBM. SL may be
dependent upon the RHEL sources that RedHat and IBM are required to
provide under the GPL, etc., but will make things operational and, as a
separate distro, also is required to release source. Once SL is not a
distro, internal changes at Fermilab/CERN to CentOS do not have the same
general "public" immediacy as would an official public distro. As has
been explained elsewhere, going from such source to a bootable stable
useful OS environment is no trivial matter -- an OS does not simply and
automatically "rebuild" from such source. It is important that a distro
be professionally maintained, not by amateur volunteers. The latter
approach may work for some applications, but not an entire OS that is a
much more complicated entity than most applications. The professional
staff doing the distro presumably have this work as part of their
assigned compensated duties, not simply as an amateur when one has the
time for it (retired or independently wealthy professionals doing the
distro are not the personnel base upon which one can rely).
On 2/20/20 11:12 PM, Pwillis wrote:
Hello,
Is Scientific Linux still active?
There was another message that alluded to ’SL’ being ‘dead’.
Installing this on a diskless node system is not an option if the distribution
is no longer supported.
Thanks fort any info,
Peter
