CentOS is now dead!

[Predrag Punosevac]

Hi Robert,

FYI it is not the question of if but only when will Microsoft acquire
Canonical so Ubuntu might not live much longer either. The reasons why I
prefer to work with rebuilds of RHEL over Debian derivatives are of
technical nature, not the lack of familiarity. At the University of
Arizona, we were Debian/Ubunutu shop. That was my first exposure to Linux
after US research university started purging Irix first and then Solaris
from their computer labs in the late 90s. For me personally moving from
Solaris to Linux felt like the beginning of the decline. At this time most
national labs just like I do prefer to deal with RHEL clones. Desktops are
another story but all cool kids with money already use macOS even that Big
Sur sucks big time :-)

Springdale Linux is the oldest RHEL clone created by a dedicated team from
Princeton University, Institute for Advanced Studies, and Rutgers
supercomputing center. I don't see anything dramatically changing in the
near future.  Usually quiet Springdale Linux mailing list was buzzing with
activity this morning by mostly disfranchised CentOS users. It might be
short-lived but might actually strengthen our compunity.

Cheers,
Predrag



On Wed, Dec 9, 2020, 9:34 AM Robert Edman <redman at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

> fwiw, a few people (myself, Gus, Anthony) in the lab have been getting
> pretty good with running ubuntu in the lab environment. (I put it on my
> desktop when you said I should replace the OS, and I'm more familiar with
> administration of ubuntu than springdale - and in my experience, better
> package support). VPN, nfs, etc... are all up and running. If that is a
> direction you are forced to go in the future, we can at least give you some
> pointers.
>
> --Rob
>
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 1:23 AM Predrag Punosevac <predragp at andrew.cmu.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Autonians,
>>
>> CentOS is officially dead.
>>
>> https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/#comments
>>
>> IBM who aquired RedHat last year have pulled the plug on CentOS in
>> similar fashion Oracle did with OpenSolaris after SunMicrosystems
>> aqusition. The writing was on the wall ever since Red Hat killed Scientific
>> Linux by hiring off its developer from Fermi labs and shortly after hiring
>> CentOS project founders.
>>
>> In the near term the above news will have no effect on the Auton Lab
>> computing infrastructure as we are using Springdale Linux, the oldest free
>> rebuilt of the RHEL by Princeton university. Long term RPM availability
>> might become problematic as people will have no incentive to create those
>> RPMs as free RHEL rebuilt ecosystem just shrunk 90%.
>>
>> With Red Hat and SUSE Linux fully proprietary whithout stable community
>> edition, Ubuntu remains only other major relatively stable Linux distro
>> still available for free use.
>>
>> I continue to monitor situation and reaction of major US national
>> laboratories who mostly use CentOS.
>>
>> I wish I could tell you that this woul lead to major growth and
>> popularity of Springdale Linux or the raise of BSD based scientific
>> computing ecosystem but that seems very unlikely.
>>
>> The newly minted PhDs should embrace themselves for the era of
>> proprietary OSs. Welcome back to 1980s,1990s and UNIX wars.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Predrag
>>
>
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