Open To All
Growing a community and making it easier for folks to contribute is a critical element of success. We are excited by the interest in working with the CentOS project.
Since Spring 2023, the CentOS Board and members of the community have been working on a set of guidelines to help define what success means for CentOS and its deliverables. Building community and contribution has been a part of the guidelines from day one.
We are excited by interest from new contributors and look forward to working with them to improve the CentOS project, our collective SIG communities, and the Linux ecosystem overall.
The CentOS Board of Directors
Thanks for this statement. Could you please give clear assurance that CentOS Stream will not disappear over night from the open (i.e. by moving it behind Red Hat's "terms of service" wall like it happened with other deliverables previously published by this project), at least not during the expected lifecycle?
CentOS Stream is the primary place for development of the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and is a crucial piece of our development workflow within RHEL Engineering. Removing CentOS Stream before the publicly stated lifecycle expires would significantly hinder our ability to produce RHEL during the full support phase. It would run directly counter to the goals we have for working with the community, our partners, and our customers in a collaborative project. I recognize this is easy to say in words, but it is also very demonstrable by looking at the CentOS Stream Gitlab source repositories to see exactly how much work we drive through CentOS Stream on a weekly basis. Our actions speak louder than our words can in this regard.
With that said, and with the data present today which shows commitment, Red Hat has no plans to end a CentOS Stream release before the published lifecycle.
- Josh Boyer, as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Architect
What was the point of this announcement?
I literally can't figure it out. Is it an invitation to collaborate on the "set of guidelines to help define what success means for CentOS and its deliverables?" Or an announcement that they're ready for review, that somehow forgot to link to them?
The guidelines have been openly discussed in the Board Meetings since May. The guidelines have been refined with the input of community members in attendance and at this point we are doing research to determine the metrics we will measure some of the guidelines to. You can find a link to the Guidelines in any of the posted agendas from the last 3 months as well as listen to the discussions by reviewing the meeting recordings.
Understood, so what then is the point of this announcement? Is it "we're working on guidelines, have fun following the breadcrumbs in the comments of this post to go find them"?
If the guidelines are the focus of this announcement why would you not link to them?
This post exists to highlight our ongoing process to make on boarding and contributing to CentOS Stream a better experience. Not everyone chooses to attend or review the CentOS Board meetings; part of our ongoing imitative to make CentOS a more transparent organization is to highlight relevant topics we are working on.
The CentOS Project is here to work with new and existing community members of all skill levels.
You can reach the guidelines from the agenda here: https://hackmd.io/ef11J9PKSBesYkzrT5aRnw
Folks are welcome to express feedback on this as we develop these ideas. This is very much still a draft with a lot of unknown targets.
I'm sorry but this seems such a panic response by out of touch suits to what they've caused.
I don't hate Red Hat and appreciate all the OSS contributions they've done (and keep doing) but from what I know they had a pretty closed approach to RHEL developement. AFAIK (and I may be wrong) but you couldn't directly contribute to RHEL development, then RH came and flipped CentOS upside-down because freeloaders but that didn't stop them. New projects came like Alma and Rocky but RH didn't like that either so they decided to stop publishing sources (really in the spirit of open-source, eh?).
Now CentOS says they're open to all? Why would anyone trust building anything on this shaky foundation when RH could come any minute and pull the plug completely or just add extra barriers?
All of these events and talks just seems dishonest. Eiher you're open-source, publish sources and accept everything that comes with it or you stay proprietary.
Hi Bob, no suits involved here only people involved in the community because they care about it. The move to Stream was so that folks can contribute to the project. Is it easy to do so, no it's not, but we're working on making it easier. There will be bumps along the way but this is Open Source and while there are some people who are paid to be here there are many of us who give our time and energy to the project.
See the response from Josh for your other concerns.
We will try to help with what we can but I think the community is somewhat divided. I have always been in favor of unifying efforts.
I hope that the efforts of the community will later be public.