On 2020-11-11 the CentOS Board of Directors met to discuss ongoing business.
First, the board would like to thanks everybody involved in CentOS Linux 7.9 release.
The Board was in an Executive session, where Red Hat CTO, Chris Wright joined to present Red Hat plan around CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream. A Board discussion followed.
Following up the discussion around the different users' communities impacted by proposed changes, Chris Wright, mentioned to the Board that Red Hat is also reshaping and expanding the RHEL Developer program. The details will be communicated through standard Red Hat channels.
The following resolutions were approved by the majority of the Board :
- CentOS Stream 8 will continue with contributions for the full-support phase of RHEL 8. APPROVED
- CentOS Stream 9 will start on schedule with the RHEL 9 Beta. APPROVED
- CentOS Linux 9 will not start. APPROVED
- CentOS Linux 8 ends in December 2021. APPROVED
An announcement and detailed FAQ will be prepared in next weeks.
No other issue has been discussed this month, and updates will be amended to tickets if necessary.
"CentOS Linux 8 ends in November 2021. APPROVED"
So long story short, instead of listening to input from the community and coming up with some compromise at the very least.
RH board decided to give a big FU to the community.
Dully noted.
We see you, Red Hat.
Had this been made much clearer in the planning of CentOS 8, you would have saved fruitless endeavour by the people who moved from CentOS 6 or 7 to 8 and now want to move away from CentOS and Red Hat to anything else.
Just moved many servers from 6 and 7 to 8, and I'm pissed off!
So... yeah. As feared, Red Hat totally ignored the independence that CentOS was supposed to have. That we were promised it would have. And they said, "Oh yeah, that thing you promised to do for people, through May 2039, yeah, well.. you can't do it."
That is the worst kind of backstabbing possible. Thanks for making us all have to change everything we do during a pandemic when we can't go into our offices. Brilliant.
Complete and total betrayal.
> "The following resolutions were approved by the majority of the Board :"
It would be nice to know exactly who voted each way. RH has a permanent majority on the board. Did these resolutions get pushed through simply because of the RH block vote? Did anyone else like them?
"APPROVED" is nothing worth anymore. Here you can read what was approved and everybody relies on: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product
CentOS-8
Full Updates May 2024
Maintenance Updates May 31st, 2029
Tomorrow we will read the next APPROVED story.
"CentOS Linux 8 ends in December 2021. APPROVED"
If you guys could revert at least THIS thing, we'll apreciate it.
Dropping an OS with just 12 months notice that has such a huge following is tantamount to suicide - the community WILL loose faith in the Enterprise product based on this decision. Developing on CentOS with knowledge that the production rollout on RHEL will be seamless has long been a way of working in many organisations and especially for one-man-band software houses that supply to bigger companies.