CentOS is now dead!

[Gus Welter]

Don't even say that about ms acquiring ubuntu, oh God....
And \agree about big sur sucks big time. Big step backward.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 10:06 AM Predrag Punosevac <predragp at andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:

> 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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