I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Linux succeed where CentOS "failed"? How would Rocky Linux get resources to sustain it?
The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors.
The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
Same story as an Ubuntu user. Actually, doesn't everyone go to the Arch wiki? :D
Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
That's not documentation that's support knowledgebase. You can just pay for a single subscription at 349$/yr and get access to it. It's worth it if you are running a large fleet.
Upvoting because you are correct that the documentation is freely available and it’s only the knowledge-base that requires an account. However, there can be some very useful information in the knowledge-base, e.g., resolutions to problems that don’t have a readily available answer anywhere else on the Internet. If you’re not running a large fleet, a cheaper option is to sign up for a developer account which costs nothing.
Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.
A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important.
It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support.
I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD.
RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.
Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.
Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release.
Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand.
But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival.
I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it.
Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried.
Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset.
There's no question about that, but I just don't equate a large install base with being successful. Had CentOS been successful, there would have been no Redhat involvement. CentOS failed the day Redhat took control of the project. After that it was just an version of RHEL without the subscription.
Companies wanted RHEL, but not pay for the development and maintenance. If this changes, and more companies are will to either donate to pay developers, or hire Rocky Linux develops, then maybe it will be successful. If it's just a few people slaving away in their free time, trying to maintain a parallel RHEL build, then I kinda doubt it's longevity.
Rocky Linux seems to have made a bigger deal of getting and advertising sponsors than I remember from CentOS. CentOS had a subtle link to donate, but that was it. Right off the bat, Rocky Linux had a nicer looking landing page and BIG sponsor logos. And I would absolutely have thrown $100 at CentOS to keep existing, it just never occurred to me that it was needed or would make a difference.
It's not the I just want something for nothing. I'll pay for good tools, but my time is money too and if I feel myself going down a high-touch sales process with stuff that feels like lock-in and DRM, I'm gonna check out and go for an alternative pretty quick. I used CentOS all the time because I was in the position of trying to support people running my software on Red Hat. And I never had to worry about talking to a sales person, or making sure my keys for the repository were everywhere they needed to be. I would have still used it, even if I had to enter my personal credit card to get an official ISO. Even once my company had a proper agreement and partnership with Red Hat, it was still a pain for me to get a system up and running without talking to IT, etc.
Red Hat seems to have lighter-weight licensing for such use cases now, so we'll see. But at this point I've already switched over to Ubuntu and I doubt Red Hat or Red Hat clones will ever fully recover to their former glory.
How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival.
CentOS 3, 4, 5, 6 and now 7 have all fulfilled their mission to be bit-clones of RHEL since 2004. As a CentOS user of every single one of them, they were a success and satisfied the needs of the community for 17 years. The first version of Ubuntu was released 6 months after CentOS 3.
CentOS failed because it's sponsor willed it to do so. When it went from being focused on long term stability to a rolling release, it was no longer in alignment with the reason it's users selected it. Since Rocky is being developed by some of the same people that did CentOS, I suspect that things will be just fine... after all, they benefit from being a downstream distribution.
When it went from being focused on long term stability to a rolling release
The approach to "long term stability" has not changed whatsoever. The only difference is whether the updates are delivered as point-release bundles every 6 months, or incrementally. And it's supported for 5 years instead of 10, which is in-line with other free LTS distros.
CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
Comments
I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Linux succeed where CentOS "failed"? How would Rocky Linux get resources to sustain it?
The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors.
The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
Same story as an Ubuntu user. Actually, doesn't everyone go to the Arch wiki? :D
Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing!
(Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.
If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.
I always wondered why its not n*x
Fair enough
In fairness, that's kind of the point of CentOS et al.
You can just go to the RHEL docs. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
There are plenty of RHEL docs that will show up in a search but are inaccessible because it's hidden behind a login.
That's not documentation that's support knowledgebase. You can just pay for a single subscription at 349$/yr and get access to it. It's worth it if you are running a large fleet.
Upvoting because you are correct that the documentation is freely available and it’s only the knowledge-base that requires an account. However, there can be some very useful information in the knowledge-base, e.g., resolutions to problems that don’t have a readily available answer anywhere else on the Internet. If you’re not running a large fleet, a cheaper option is to sign up for a developer account which costs nothing.
Didn’t it fail because RH chose so? C8 certainly works fine, if boring.
Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.
It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important.
Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support.
I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7.
AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there
I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.
They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.
The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.
They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money.
So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD.
RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.
Just stop talking.
Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release.
Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand.
But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases
6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.
CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”.
I wish Rocky Linux the same success!
How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival.
I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it.
Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried.
Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset.
But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
There's no question about that, but I just don't equate a large install base with being successful. Had CentOS been successful, there would have been no Redhat involvement. CentOS failed the day Redhat took control of the project. After that it was just an version of RHEL without the subscription.
Companies wanted RHEL, but not pay for the development and maintenance. If this changes, and more companies are will to either donate to pay developers, or hire Rocky Linux develops, then maybe it will be successful. If it's just a few people slaving away in their free time, trying to maintain a parallel RHEL build, then I kinda doubt it's longevity.
Rocky Linux seems to have made a bigger deal of getting and advertising sponsors than I remember from CentOS. CentOS had a subtle link to donate, but that was it. Right off the bat, Rocky Linux had a nicer looking landing page and BIG sponsor logos. And I would absolutely have thrown $100 at CentOS to keep existing, it just never occurred to me that it was needed or would make a difference.
It's not the I just want something for nothing. I'll pay for good tools, but my time is money too and if I feel myself going down a high-touch sales process with stuff that feels like lock-in and DRM, I'm gonna check out and go for an alternative pretty quick. I used CentOS all the time because I was in the position of trying to support people running my software on Red Hat. And I never had to worry about talking to a sales person, or making sure my keys for the repository were everywhere they needed to be. I would have still used it, even if I had to enter my personal credit card to get an official ISO. Even once my company had a proper agreement and partnership with Red Hat, it was still a pain for me to get a system up and running without talking to IT, etc.
Red Hat seems to have lighter-weight licensing for such use cases now, so we'll see. But at this point I've already switched over to Ubuntu and I doubt Red Hat or Red Hat clones will ever fully recover to their former glory.
CentOS 3, 4, 5, 6 and now 7 have all fulfilled their mission to be bit-clones of RHEL since 2004. As a CentOS user of every single one of them, they were a success and satisfied the needs of the community for 17 years. The first version of Ubuntu was released 6 months after CentOS 3.
CentOS failed because it's sponsor willed it to do so. When it went from being focused on long term stability to a rolling release, it was no longer in alignment with the reason it's users selected it. Since Rocky is being developed by some of the same people that did CentOS, I suspect that things will be just fine... after all, they benefit from being a downstream distribution.
The approach to "long term stability" has not changed whatsoever. The only difference is whether the updates are delivered as point-release bundles every 6 months, or incrementally. And it's supported for 5 years instead of 10, which is in-line with other free LTS distros.
Nope. CentOS stream is ahead of RHEL and has been pitched as a developent version of RHEL. Prior to the change, CentOS was basically a complete opensource RHEL with long term support. https://thenewstack.io/back-to-the-future-a-look-at-centos-s...
CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
MoviePass had a large number of subscribers. It's very easy to be successful if you're giving something away for free and ignore sustainability.
Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then.
It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.