If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement.
It's hard to get community support for projects that are business-focused. A project that is very general-purpose can get quite a few volunteers or donations. But if businesses are the primary users, the project often gets little to no support from those businesses, and very infrequently any contributed code or support. Getting my own company to donate to an OSS project that they heavily depend on is like pulling teeth. Which is ridiculous, because without that project they'd be paying a lot more for proprietary software!
I mean that kind of defeats the point of the effort and FOSS in general.
If you need to pay you just buy RedHat.
CentOS reached ubiquity by being free. Many large corporations already have competent system admins managing large installations/clusters that RedHat offered nothing worth purchasing over CentOS.
Another approach to support is probably better rather than becoming RedHat 0.1
I used to support a corporate CentOS fork for years. I think I built something like 10,000 custom packages over several releases. If I found a bug and wanted to submit a code fix, I couldn't just submit it, because corporate wouldn't allow us to "release intellectual property". If I wanted to donate money I had to do it from my own wallet, because the company wouldn't approve the expense.
But if our only legal option (given our size) was to pay one flat fee for infinite installs, or one flat fee per N nodes or something, the company would have approved that, because we needed to use something RHEL-like. If it's totally free, the company won't help at all. I think a few large companies could probably provide most of the funding necessary for the project, and still be ridiculously cheaper than RHEL.
I'd only do this for business-focused projects, because of the tendency for those "users" not to contribute anything back. FOSS only thrives when people contribute. Otherwise you're a one-man software welfare program.
If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement.
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If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement.
It's hard to get community support for projects that are business-focused. A project that is very general-purpose can get quite a few volunteers or donations. But if businesses are the primary users, the project often gets little to no support from those businesses, and very infrequently any contributed code or support. Getting my own company to donate to an OSS project that they heavily depend on is like pulling teeth. Which is ridiculous, because without that project they'd be paying a lot more for proprietary software!
I mean that kind of defeats the point of the effort and FOSS in general.
If you need to pay you just buy RedHat.
CentOS reached ubiquity by being free. Many large corporations already have competent system admins managing large installations/clusters that RedHat offered nothing worth purchasing over CentOS.
Another approach to support is probably better rather than becoming RedHat 0.1
I used to support a corporate CentOS fork for years. I think I built something like 10,000 custom packages over several releases. If I found a bug and wanted to submit a code fix, I couldn't just submit it, because corporate wouldn't allow us to "release intellectual property". If I wanted to donate money I had to do it from my own wallet, because the company wouldn't approve the expense.
But if our only legal option (given our size) was to pay one flat fee for infinite installs, or one flat fee per N nodes or something, the company would have approved that, because we needed to use something RHEL-like. If it's totally free, the company won't help at all. I think a few large companies could probably provide most of the funding necessary for the project, and still be ridiculously cheaper than RHEL.
I'd only do this for business-focused projects, because of the tendency for those "users" not to contribute anything back. FOSS only thrives when people contribute. Otherwise you're a one-man software welfare program.
That's just RHEL; https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-ent... for FOSS and https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/02/10/how-to-activat... for non-corporate users.