Last week Red Hat made an earth-shaking announcement and ended CentOS 8 almost nine years ahead of schedule. Understandingly this caused quite the stir in the Linux community. CentOS started off life as a community rebuild of RHEL as Red Hat released their source to comply with the GPL. It existed independent of Red Hat until 2014 and was understandably quite popular. There were several community rebuilds of RHEL back then but CentOS was the survivor, Scientific Linux was the other major player that folded up shop last year. Even if you paid for RHEL you probably used CentOS in testing or development environments. Many RHEL admins trained and learned on CentOS too. I remember when Red Hat acquired the CentOS project in 2014 there was a lot of hand wringing over what this meant as CentOS cut directly into Red Hat's bottom line. Once again these community worries came back up in 2018 when IBM acquired Red Hat. Although it took six years it seems many of the doubters were proven correct last week.

I'm not a huge user of RHEL or CentOS user myself. We use RHEL and CentOS in the office in some places we are required to but for the most part my infrastructure pieces are Debian. Among many other things I like the governance and structure of the Debian project much more along with the "universal operating system" approach they take. I've run Debian as a desktop as well and it works just fine in that situation too and has become easier to do with backports and testing actually becoming usable and getting more timely security patches. Debian stable is probably my favorite server operating system to work with. So, the direct impacts of CentOS being taken out back and shot are minimal on my day-to-day life. However, since 2016 or so I've been using Fedora as my desktop operating system. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu for a few reasons and Fedora had what I thought was pretty sane defaults, handled the HiDPi screen on my laptop better and flat out looked the best. I mostly ran the KDE Plasma spin at the time but over the last 8-12 months or so I've even adopted GNOME on my laptop. Fedora is the project that CentOS and RHEL are ultimately derived from and Red Hat/IBM has a controlling stake in the Fedora Project. I'm also a pretty big Ansible user and have been since before they were bought out by Red Hat.

This is where I become concerned. Two of the major projects I use on a daily basis, Fedora and Ansible, are owned and controlled by a company that just threw the on part of the Linux community under the bus. Yeah, I understand that they have a profit center to protect and CentOS was directly impacting that. Part of it was certainly bad communication before hand that CentOS was a "best effort" product and not really guaranteed, but cutting CentOS 8 off in 2021 when many people were counting on it until 2029 is brutal, no two ways about it.

Right now Fedora is likely safe as is the free version of Ansible. I can't say I'm entirely comfortable with Red Hat having such a large stake in Fedora now. Fedora makes a big deal about being community driven but Red Hat still has a controlling stake in the project and puts up a lot of infrastructure for it. On paper Fedora is independent but in practice it's entirely reliant on Red Hat and Red Hat has a substantial driving force in the project. What does this mean going forward? Will Red Hat or IBM start wanting telemetry or some other dubious thing implemented in Fedora? I'm not saying they will but I think a lot of free software users and fans would feel a lot better with a more independent Fedora. Even if it means they need to have NPR or PBS style pledge drives every year to pay for infrastructure I think it would be preferable to having so much reliance on Red Hat and IBM. I'd gladly chuck some money at a Fedora Foundation if it meant they could tell IBM to pound sand if the community thought something from corporate was a bad move.

Red Hat likes to crow a lot about open source and community but this move has burned a lot of bridges. In the short term I suspect they'll net a few more RHEL subscriptions from those who can afford to convert over. But the memory of the community is long and this move may burn them in the long term, trust isn't something that's earned easily as most of us are here because we don't trust closed software vendors like Apple and Microsoft. Right now I've switched back to Debian on my laptop and I may move my workstation back to it in the coming weeks but we will see. For now it's still on Fedora 33.

Debian isn't perfect but it's at least free from a lot of corporate meddling and is a more truly community driven project. I mean, they even have package on anarchism in their distro.

I don't mean this as a knock against the fine folks at the Fedora Project. It's a great piece of software and I still say it's the best "get it installed and get to work" type Linux out there. I still highly recommend it to anyone looking to start out in Linux, Debian isn't nearly as easy to get started with. Fedora also doesn't shove proprietary package managers in behind your back like Ubuntu. I really care about the direction of and enjoy the Fedora Project as a whole. I just don't trust the organization paying your power bills at the moment.