RIP CentOS...Is Fedora Next?

welcome back gadgeteers so an issue has surfaced in the linux community that made me come out of semi-retirement if you will okay i wasn't retired at all i was just taking a hiatus i'll be here don't worry uh i don't know if you've heard or not but the cenos project that has been going for years and years and years is unfortunately going to be cancelled there will still be a version of cenos called cenos stream and if you're interested in each of the versions and how they differ red hat to cenos to cenos stream i have a video on that that i will put the link for in the description and i'll also have hopefully let's see where my finger yeah way over here no way over there anyway somewhere up there a message should appear and you can watch that video if you'd like so we've got kind of a strange animal here how can i put it well we've got red hat enterprise linux most people call it rel sometimes i call it our hell just to be silly we have ceno s which is essentially a bit for bit copy of the source code of red hat linux then we have cenos stream which is the newer product that the cenos project has decided to produce cenoa stream is actually pretty cool it's what they call a rolling distro but in reality it's literally code updates it's it's almost like fedora rawhide if you will fedora rawhide uh if you're on that uh distribution you end up getting the latest packages of anything especially uh well i shouldn't say especially but that night so rawhide is compiled i want i want to say every night but i could be wrong it might be more like every week or something like that needless to say why did cenos come about in the first place let's let's talk about a little bit of the history well red hat's a pretty old company they've been around for a long time and a long time being i think it was in the late 90s when they surfaced and originally you could get red hat for free and then you could buy red hat on disks but you could download it for free and then red hat said you know what we could make a business structure whereby we provide top level services to anybody who's serious about running a linux uh workstation or server so we will give server management so that they can log in and see all their servers they can run on updates through the server management they can get phone support if they would like phone support and multiple levels of support so this is really uh you know to a company that is getting started in linux and kind of wants some backup it's a good way to get started in linux but it's not cheap and the price has slowly gone up i'm not sure what it is now now if you're a non-profit not for profit or governmental institution usually get a very good price uh years back we would get uh like a 50 annual price and they call it an entitlement so basically we will give to you one entitlement to load workstation on one computer or load server and once you uh link that entitlement with a computer basically the only way you can get it back is by removing the entitlement so it's almost like a licensing agreement in some ways but it's not a license it's an entitlement now because red hat is based on the gpl gnu public licensing structure they cannot however keep you from downloading the source code for free the source code must be available so cenos came along and said and it was a variety of other uh organizations that were creating um bit for bit copies of red hat and basically they grouped together and said let's go ahead and create a bit accurate version of red hat we'll strip out all the uh intellectual property like the logos or [Music] checking in with the server for the services that you can have for your workstation or servers and we will just create a near mirror version of red hat enterprise linux and we won't charge anything it'll be free well initially it did quite well but then it started to pick up quite a lot of steam the reason being as you know businesses are constantly trying to cut corners reduce spending um any way they can and one of the ways is you know these manager types would sit in a meeting directors whatever and say well isn't linux free i don't understand why why we're paying for linux when it's free and i've been through this actual discussion with upper management and you say well yes it is free but the services support and management of red hat is not free and they say okay well can you get a copy for free of some other linux they didn't even know what a distribution was and you say well yes we could and what is the first thing any reasonable systems manager would look at and it would be cenos because cenoas follows arhel or rels release schedule meaning that red hat might have let's say version 5.0 come out cenos about a month later would get that source code and compile it and there would be a cenos 5.0 sometimes it was longer it just varied but that operating system from cenos was perfectly reliable in other words there were no changes so all the stability that you got from red hat 5.0 you also got incentives 5.0 perfect relationship perfect now some things started to change as we got into the teens of this decade one thing that changed which was big and i was fairly concerned about this was when ibm purchased red hat now i i'd heard that red hat was on the market and i was a little bit concerned of how big blue was going to run the show and whether or not it was going to cause problems with red hat there's no way for us to know if ibm was leaning on red hat and that's why what we're going to talk about happened or not but ibm purchased red hat red hat entered into an agreement with cenos they said hey you know we could do some major funding for cenos because it's good for us in the sense that we can send the uh code and maybe some other information that would help them compile and get it to so-called market quicker and in return some of the updates and changes from cenos could be shipped back to red hat that sounded like a great idea as i understand it the cenos council slowly got taken over well i don't know if it was slow actually but the majority became uh red hat people and the majority of re the cenos projects income provider was red hat that still doesn't explain why this year red hat made a decision and it was posted on cenos you can actually take a look at it cenos project shifts focus to scentos stream but what they really meant was no more cenos so cenos 8 is the last version of cenos you will have cenoa stream is very interesting they say the future of the cenos project is stream and over the next year we'll be shifting focus from cenos linux the rebuild of the red hat enterprise linux the thing that made cenos so awesome to senos stream which tracks just ahead of a current rel release cenotes linux 8 as a rebuild of rail 8 will end meaning support or any uh management that you could get from cenos in 2021 and when i say support i'm really talking about updates so normally you would have four or five years support if you're on red hat and sun os as well now support is relative uh support on red hat is actually something you pay for and you probably get phone support and other things whereas cenoas support really means we will continue to release updates based on the red hat code for your version of cenos pretty cool but not anymore the scent os stream which is an upstream development branch of red hat enterprise linux is going to be the only sun os so you can see that it's going to be really cutting edge this isn't something you would put on a server so cenos is going to go away and what effect will that have on the linux community well for us desktop users probably very little i don't think many people will notice a difference unless you are a cenos user directly but the business segment which use cenos a lot on their servers can you imagine having just deployed cenos 8 on 100 000 servers and you're thinking well i've got four or five more years before i have to worry about you know support expiring on this and then you find out that cenos is shifting their stream kind of silly focus not their stream shifting their focus and so they will no longer support cenos version 8. you only get one year of support so it's going to end in december of 2021 for somebody that's configured and deployed many servers that would really be bad news it'd be very difficult for me just from you know the level of work that it'll take to move it to another appropriate linux operating system it sounds easy but you got to think about all the applications that are running and they're usually web-based applications or databases we you know you don't know how that application is going to work if you're on cenos 8 versus say debian azure server ubuntu ubuntu if you would rather me say it like that and i really don't consider fedora linux tenable if you want to run a server because really they only have six months of support and the last thing you want to do is have to change uh your version of linux every six months when you need total reliability minor security changes only so you can't use fedora so that brings me to another question so now red hat 8 stream sorry i'm reading this and i'm reading it wrong so cenos stream is going to be the upstream kind of the innovative development branch of red hat enterprise linux which is what fedora is doing and if you look at how they're positioning these different software packages it gets very very compu confusing so fedora might create some changes in the code and maybe cenos stream likes it so they import it into cenos stream centos stream to fedora red hat may take updates from fedora and updates from cenos stream it gets really confusing and my thoughts are and i may be wrong but i'm thinking that fedora is going to go away and here's why i say that now right now it's working great but if cenos stream a rolling distribution which basically supersedes the six-month release of each fedora distribution version i should say is it necessary now to have fedora is fedora outmoded their release method and we can have something much more cutting edge you know on a regular basis i don't know how often they would recompile the source code but much faster than the six months of course the trade-off is reliability and there's no getting around that because if you install stream and you get all your applications to work and there's a new version available a week later how will that affect you but i'm really thinking they're going to get rid of fedora and the only reason i think that is because of red hat's um very quick shift of getting rid of cenos eight so they're not going to wait four or five years and give that support they're ending it now they want to get out basically they want to get out of the market and this seems to be from a business perspective is what i think so ibm may have knocked down red hat store and said hey is there something you could do about containing costs and we've got a lot of duplication here that we don't need why are we making a red hat enterprise linux and a ceno s8 that's just silly you know we have two development organizations basically and red hat said hmm we could get rid of cenos eight and cut the corners move the development people we need from cenos eight to red hat projects or cenos eight stream and we could to save even more money get rid of fedora linux because we probably have enough development going on with cenoa cenos eight stream and red hat enterprise linux or hell that we don't need fedora anymore we can continue to streamline everything there is a problem when red hat decided to get rid of the cenos packages it created an instant vacuum so if somebody's getting server product free and they have a hundred thousand servers using our example earlier they're not inclined to go purchase it from red hat they may not have it in their budget at all and the costs involved are prohibitive but i feel like red hat thinks its position in the market they can go ahead and cancel cenos eight snip the cord and say what are you gonna do now well you can go to debian if you want but if you want the same code base you're going to have to use rel i don't think i would say well over 50 of the companies would say no so my thoughts are what we're going to see happen is another organization is going to come along that isn't affiliated with a company and do a bit for a bit compilation of the red hat enterprise code and again there will be no charge that's all i can imagine whether it will surface in the next year or it will surface in three or four years we have this huge vacuum now in the professional linux distribution environment and i don't think debian is in the correct position to take care of that they might you know i haven't used any debian for servers so i don't know it may be that debian is ready for prime time and could take over the server environment throughout the world or not i would not use ubuntu and the reason my thoughts are don't use ubuntu is because ubuntu also is owned by a private company that is for profit it does concern me when you're getting kicked from cenos 8 via a private company right and then go to another private company and just hope for the best just hope you've got four more years uh you know with support and whatnot so i would be very nervous anyway my predictions another organization non-profit is going to come up and do a bit for bit compilation of the red hat code and create a new cenos like linux and i'm very concerned i can't say you know i guess the percentage of chance i would give is like 70 that fedora is going to go away as well now i was looking at the fedora website fedora sponsors red hat incorporated as the primary sponsor for the fedora project red hat provides the fedora project with a wide variety of resource including full-time employee support infrastructure hardware and bandwidth event funding and legal counsel for an organization that's huge just think about it if they pulled something well we no longer will give you a full-time employee support meaning pay for it and our infrastructure that we have for hardware and bandwidth server implementations for uh you know development and production no we're not going to do that anymore event funding probably could live without it legal counsel that would make me really nervous so if red hat and ibm decide no we don't need fedora we have cenos stream fedora will go away if red hat chooses they can make it go away just like they did the cenos project i'm worried but i'm gonna hang in there i'm still using fedora i'm still on fedora 32. uh i do look forward to upgrading to fedora 33 although i do not think i'm going to do it from scratch to get bt rfs or butter rfs or butter fs i believe um because there really aren't a huge number of changes they're going to slowly implement the changes into fedora as time goes on so i'll probably wait a year or so before i scratch my linux and start over tell me what you think leave a comment i'm really curious to see how you feel about this situation how do you feel about privately owned companies that are for-profit running these types of projects and what they do with them it really worries me not from an individual standpoint we can always find another distro as an individual but if you were running a large organization and you relied on cenos ow that would really hurt so let me know leave a comment below as always i really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this with me let me know what you think we already talked about that right anyway if you get a chance subscribe i would really appreciate it and the comments always help thanks for watching this video was made possible with support from viewers like you if you find this video useful consider becoming a patron for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com forward slash fast [Music] gadgets [Music] you

Channel: FastGadgets

Views: 5,483

Keywords: technology, tech, Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, KDE, Kde, Plasma, Gnome, Gnu, distro, Distribution, repository, repo, Fedora Project, CentOS, Cent OS

Id: mKVvhGxFiTw

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020