Original CentOS founder intends to create new fork of RHEL | Hacker News Reader

Original CentOS founder intends to create new fork of RHEL

rockylinux.org

68 pointsbluedays8 comments

The original founder is intending to create a new fork of RHEL due to the recent news coming out of Red Hat/IBM over the switch to CentOS streaming. There is now a new community forming around a linux distribution called Rocky Linux. In fact there is now a community forming on Freenode, as well. The MOTD on their IRC channel reads:

> We're #rockylinux and #rockylinux-devel on freenode

Is dev chat shifting to freenode?

I saw talk about a Matrix server bridging to IRC/Slack/etc, though I haven’t gone back in a few hours.

Nice! I hope a lot of the major VPS providers end up supporting it like Digital Ocean or Linode, etc. Shame many of them you just can't just upload your own ISO.

I have a project idea I been toying with and my plan was to use CentOS as the base, but the news has been a big disappointment. I'm not too far along though, so switching to something like Debian wouldn't be too hard but I liked the idea of longer stable releases.

Feel like the folks at Red Hat/IBM has stabbed the community in the back, and also wondering about the other projects they support like Podman, etc.

The EOL for CentOS 8 was supposed to be 2029, so people and organizations planned on using it for the stability without needing to worry about major yearly upgrades. So if they take their word back on this project, what about other projects or even paid products by the same company?

Then some were mentioning they waited until CentOS 6 was EOL, so some just skipped CentOS 7 and went straight to 8. Then with COVID shutdowns causing cutbacks and layoffs at places, people might have to upgrade sooner than they'd hope to something else or fork out the money. Seems predatory to me, so I think this move makes IBM look bad. Really hope someone realizes this is a huge mistake and backtracks. Feel like this is something someone in higher management did hoping to increase revenue without thinking about the whole larger picture.

FWIW, Vultr supports iPXE [1] so you can boot pretty much anything.

[1] - https://www.vultr.com/docs/ipxe-boot-feature

Ubuntu LTS has a long-ish support period (5 years and 5 extra years on top for "extended security support") and isn't that different than Debian, just slightly ahead in some ways ( did you know that Debian's OpenSSH even in the latest stable, ships without options available since mainline OpenSSH 7.2 ( Include), while being on 8.2?).

I do hope it succeeds, taking the brand out of the IBM claws is worth it alone. CentOS is no more, Rocky Linux ftw.

The domain currently redirects to a particular post on the centos site - confused me at first.

Yes, that's confusing and there's very little info here. This would probably be better as a comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345428, or a submission pointing to a fuller article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com