On 12/12/20 10:34 PM, Konstantin Boyandin via CentOS wrote:
My only concern ATM is whether RH can change its CentOS 7 maintenance
plans as well, all of a sudden.
This is what bothers me, too, but in a slightly different way. Even
for the GPL software, Red Hat actually doesn't have to provide public
access to the source code; the only thing required by GPL is that
those who receive binaries must be able to get sources. So, even
though it has been said that the source will be available, well, it
was also said that C8 would be supported to 2029. There are enough
packages in RHEL with non-GPL licenses where it would be very
difficult to rebuild the whole distribution without them, and RH is
not required by those licenses (MIT, BSD, and others) to redistribute
those modified sources even to people who have been distributed
binaries. So, while I want to believe that the sources will remain
available, that belief relies on trust, which unfortunately is less
abundant these days.
So while using another rebuild seems to be a good stopgap solution, I
do wonder if it will prove to be sustainable post-2021. I'm
personally looking at which of the four (that we know about) to
possibly go to; I just really doubt I am going to use Oracle; Rocky
isn't really there yet and is very young; Springdale is available,
mature, and academically supported (nothing wrong with that, just a
statement); CloudLinux OS Project Lenix isn't yet released. Out of
the bunch, Springdale would be my first choice right now because it's
been around a very long time and is available now. C8 is supposed to
be around until end of 2021, so there is some time for the dust to
settle and the way to become more clear, though. But CentOS 8 Stream
is only an option for me if the hardware driver KABI synchronization
issue is solved and stays solved. RHEL? Under the current
subscription models we just can't afford it. (Cost also keeps SLES out
of the running.)
But I'm now seriously considering just simply going to something that
is both older than Red Hat, fully and totally open, extremely
well-supported by a diverse developer community, and used by a whole
lot of people. Yes, that's Debian; until I realized where the name
came from (Deb and Ian) it read to me like a play on 'deviant.' The
'stable' period is shorter, for sure. The tradeoffs are pretty
simple: guaranteed openness versus less change for ten years.
So, let's look at that last piece. CentOS 6's support just ended;
what have the last nine years and three months of actual C6 support
looked like? I supported several C6 machines, and there were distinct
challenges early on, at least for the first four years or so. Since
then, on the server, it's been very stable, but really old; key pieces
of infrastructure software we use slowly became unusable on C6 due to
the old versions of specific packages, and either a third-party repo
with newer packages or a newer CentOS was needed.
Third-party repos have improved over the years, but some of the
earlier C6 machines I installed had packages from Linuxtech, Dag,
ATrpms, City-Fan (one particular DVD burner that just had to have the
non-wodim cdrtools for some reason; yes, I know all the warnings about
that repo), and others. Having EPEL and Dag both package a few things
that I needed, but package them differently, introduced me to package
pinning and repo priorities.... I don't miss those days. Seriously
stable in the core repos means very little when you need much less
stable third-party repos to get actual work done. That's also why
Fedora isn't really an option, just too much package churn; been
there, done that, a few years ago.
So I've started re-evaluating just why I use CentOS anyway; the answer
really boils down to the fact that I started out with Red Hat Linux in
1997 (I live in North Carolina, and I've always liked supporting local
companies) and I just really don't want to change; it feels like I've
wasted so much effort if I change now (that was the reason I stuck
with it through the Fedora-RHEL split years ago, too, and went with a
RHEL rebuild, first WBEL then CentOS). But the reality is not nearly
so stark; a vast majority of the information and skills I've picked up
in these years are portable to other distributions; so it's not wasted
effort. Well, other than RPM packaging skills; those are a bit less
portable. Whenever I've built from source I've tried to either build
my own RPM for it or rebuild the Fedora RPM for it, and so I have a
local repo of those packages, making reinstall much easier. So it
becomes a tossup: small change to another rebuild now, possibility of
major change later, or bite the bullet and go ahead and get the major
change over with and only have small changes later.
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