December 9th, 2020 at 8:14 PM
Exactly.
It’s likely to backfire quite a bit. CentOS/RHEL are attractive because they are hugely popular and have massive communities that have been built up for decades. If someone runs into an issue, there is a huge community of people who are instantly ready to help. And this is important for their RPM based packages too. Nobody is going to bother making separate RPM binaries (for non-mainstream software) if there aren’t many users to take advantage of them.
Cutting off CentOS shrinks the very user base that helps to make the RHEL community so attractive to begin with. The enterprise users will be fine anyway, but for those who use it for more generic purposes, they just made CentOS/RHEL a fringe solution.
It’s going to be a big fall for an OS that has dominated the server landscape for many years. As you say, it’s a warning sign. Hopefully Ubuntu remains safe.
Edit: so interestingly enough, Oracle Linux looks to be a rising star in the RHEL-compatible OS sphere. It’s 100% binary compatible and is basically almost identical (minus the kernel itself), so a lot of people are considering switching.
It’s likely to backfire quite a bit. CentOS/RHEL are attractive because they are hugely popular and have massive communities that have been built up for decades. If someone runs into an issue, there is a huge community of people who are instantly ready to help. And this is important for their RPM based packages too. Nobody is going to bother making separate RPM binaries (for non-mainstream software) if there aren’t many users to take advantage of them.
Cutting off CentOS shrinks the very user base that helps to make the RHEL community so attractive to begin with. The enterprise users will be fine anyway, but for those who use it for more generic purposes, they just made CentOS/RHEL a fringe solution.
It’s going to be a big fall for an OS that has dominated the server landscape for many years. As you say, it’s a warning sign. Hopefully Ubuntu remains safe.
Edit: so interestingly enough, Oracle Linux looks to be a rising star in the RHEL-compatible OS sphere. It’s 100% binary compatible and is basically almost identical (minus the kernel itself), so a lot of people are considering switching.
