

"One of the things that this change has done is it's made it pretty clear RHEL is for production," Exelbierd said. The company's intention is to cement the idea that the production version of the operating system is RHEL. A lot of people would say support is 'can I just call someone', but support is also all of those updates and security fixes," he said. We're creating opportunities for people to use RHEL in different ways, but you can't just make a blanket statement. "We think that there are values to RHEL that go way beyond the bits.
Centos logtail for free#
Why doesn't Red Hat simply say, you can use RHEL in production for free if you do not require support? "That's not the way we think that everything should work out," Exelbierd told us. Red Hat said recently that using up to 16 RHEL servers will be free, via an amended developer licence, but many CentOS deployments have more servers than that. But our goal was not to sit down and make every CentOS Linux user a revenue RHEL customer."

There are definitely going to be some folks for whom their CentOS Linux, if it's going to become RHEL, will become paid RHEL, absolutely. "Nobody wants to go after the person with one server, two servers, 16 servers. It is absolutely not a mailing list for salespeople," Exelbierd said, adding that Red Hat has no commercial interest in small-scale users. Part of the rationale for getting more people onto RHEL is to collect feedback. we want to call your attention to them because depending on what you decide to do, there are potential liability issues that could result, so we want to make sure you have a plan." "We laid out our case and we said we're moving our engineering contribution, people time in some cases. It meets very specific needs for us," said Exelbierd. What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS. the end result was the decision that got made by the project," he said.

We believe there are consequences of this action. Then we went to the CentOS project and said, here is a thing Red Hat is going to do. "Red Hat said, we're going to make some fundamental changes in how we direct our investment. In this case, the thing that changed was Red Hat's strategy in terms of what the company was willing to sponsor. There is a caveat, though, which is that "the CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do," Exelbierd told us. The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do We have learned that open-source communities do well with independence. "CentOS is a sponsored project, we are the funding agent and we happen to also be a heavy contributor. Red Hat sponsors some open-source projects and communities," said Exelbierd. "Red Hat participates in lots of open-source projects and communities. What happened, and how is it possible that the supposedly independent CentOS project conformed to a change of direction that was not driven by the wishes of its own members?

Interview Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.Įarly last month Red Hat shocked users of CentOS, a free community build of the same sources that make up the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), by revealing that CentOS Linux would cease and be replaced by CentOS Stream, a build of what is likely to be in the next RHEL update.
