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
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.