I think IBM had nothing to do with this one. People think Red Hat won't do anything like this. However, there exists a part of Red Hat which is capable of doing this. That part of Red Hat usually stays behind the scenes and comes to the fore to announce that a decision has been made and the developers (hired within Red Hat as well as the general community) who are involved in the day to day running of the projects will have no say. Plus they will throw in some confusion (like the limited use license that is in the works but not yet ready for CentOS use) around the future of the project being killed just to let the community expect something good to come out of this exercise. This is not new. They did the exact same thing to the JBoss community application server[1].
> I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping!
Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.
I see that you note in your profile that you work at Red Hat. May I ask in which department of Red Hat? The reason I ask that is, are you part of the decision making team which made this decision? If not, then no matter how good you think the intentions of Red Hat management here are, I can assure you that they haven't been made for the betterment of the CentOS community. If this was anything to do with the betterment of the community then this wouldn't have been a sudden announcement but instead would have been a long drawn discussion involving the community. I don't say this just for the sake of it, but I have closely followed how they killed the JBoss application server community and the project, as I note in my other comment[1] and this whole CentOS announcement is exactly on similar lines. I have known people in the application server team, who initially tried to justify the whole process, just like you are doing it now for this CentOS "migration", but even they have now realized there wasn't any truth to it.
It's not a co-incidence or an accident that the messaging around the community side of this CentOS announcement is confusing and unclear (they are letting the community members try and decipher what this all means for the CentOS project) instead it is intentional.
The bottomline, just like in that other case, is that the sales team at Red Hat cannot justify the hundreds of thousands of dollars they ask for supporting RHEL, when customers (or prospective customers) note that they can get the same quality from CentOS (stable release, regular bug fixes, community help).
> Rumor is RH was planning this from before merger.
I fully believe this. Like I noted in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358847, they have done this exact similar thing in the past with the JBoss application server community edition.
There was even a restriction on the community edition to not release bug fix releases (just one was allowed). So if X.0.0 was released then X.0.1, X.0.2 and so on were not allowed. Without these bug fix releases the community versions started seeing X.1.0, X.2.0 and so on which included additional enhancements/features and weren't merely bug fix releases. As a result, the stability that the community edition of the server was known to provide (previously), no longer existed.
This all boiled down to one thing - the sales team couldn't convince customers that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the enterprise edition was a good thing when the community edition was equally good and well maintained, even if by volunteer community members.
I don't think this has anything to do with the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, but this is something that's driven by Red Hat's management itself. They did a similar thing with JBoss application server (the community edition) which was extremely popular and used within the community and even in production. Red Hat offered (and still offers) an enteprise version of it (JBoss EAP). Few years back they slowly started diminishing the prominence of the community version. They first renamed it (to WildFly) since the "JBoss" name confuses users with their enterprise edition offering. Then they started adding confusion around usage of the community edition of the server (now named WildFly) and started sending out messages (which never were clarified) that WildFly "cannot" be used in production environments (no explanation of what production environment was). Answers to these questions typically directed users to JBoss EAP (the enterprise edition) where they could enroll in developer programs and use the JBoss EAP for free for development use and then pay for the same when they use that or deploy that in production. This effectively killed the entire JBoss (now WildFly) community (external contributions, user discussions and any such interactions). WildFly these days is just there as a community project for the sake of it. There's no real external involvement in it and it's mostly driven by Red Hat employees and only rarely see any discussion happening in the open in their mailing lists anymore (can't blame them when no one external to their own employed team participates anymore).
The thing though is, developers actually involved in this project had strong opposition to the way this was handled, but none of it was heard and the "decision was already done" by people who hardly had any role to play on the day to day community involvement with the project. I am pretty sure it was the same with this CentOS decision.
I think IBM had nothing to do with this one. People think Red Hat won't do anything like this. However, there exists a part of Red Hat which is capable of doing this. That part of Red Hat usually stays behind the scenes and comes to the fore to announce that a decision has been made and the developers (hired within Red Hat as well as the general community) who are involved in the day to day running of the projects will have no say. Plus they will throw in some confusion (like the limited use license that is in the works but not yet ready for CentOS use) around the future of the project being killed just to let the community expect something good to come out of this exercise. This is not new. They did the exact same thing to the JBoss community application server[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358847