Redhat Sources Withdrawn, Centos and XCP-ng
-
@olivierlambert Currently Redhat is in the process of implementing and enforcing a new policy, rules and/or terms of service.
This involves the source code of a large variety of components which affects, the distributions downstream from RHEL. The non-CentOS Stream distribution of version 7 is coming to EOL during next year. The CentOS Stream is upstream from RHEL which means that, its less stable and more newer components than the stabilised RHEL. So if XCP-ng moves to CentOS Stream then it will have to be stabilised, by Vates and will have to deal with the shorter support and development lifecycle of CentOS Stream.
Plus with the lack of access to source code for RHEL publicly available from Redhat, as well as restricting customers ability to share the source. This means much more work and even less stability, unless Vates takes on even more development work stabilising the code base for XCP-ng.
So there's now a situation where it has to figure out how it's going to handle the EOL of CentOS 7 and CentOS Stream 8. Where its going to move to for stability if its not going with CentOS Stream, bearing in mind how its going to see what's happening with the plans for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux.
Do you have a plan to handle this situation and how is it to be dealt with?
-
Hi @john-c
Yes, we have a plan. In fact, multiple plans. Sadly, for some reasons, we can't communicate about this at the moment.
Also, keep in mind that the most important packages (Xen, XAPI, Dom0 Linux Kernel, OVS…) are NOT coming from CentOS. So this whole story is NOT a big deal to us.
-
@olivierlambert What about the software for Grub, building/executing the init images, systemd etc. Even if the kernel source code is not from CentOS, there's going to be others which come from it due to it originating to being downstream from RHEL. So as a result had even more stability, polish etc, than with CentOS Stream.
Imagine a diamond in the rough, Fedora Project does the development work on its distro and software, this is in both CentOS and CentOS Stream are upstream from Redhat RHEL. Fedora Project does development work on software from other projects, further upstream to produce its diamond, then passes it off in CentOS it was to Redhat for RHEL which adds further development and polish, which then was passed to CentOS's developers for even more polish which also got passed back up to Redhat to improve future developments. Though CentOS still had its stuff downstream from RHEL.
With CentOS Stream however its now before Redhat RHEL but after Fedora Project's Fedora Linux. So its now an intermediate step before the release of a new RHEL. So with Redhat restricting access to Redhat Sources, this then makes life harder and harder distros which are based off of Redhat RHEL. Such as the code for portions of XCP-ng. This thus CentOS Stream is more code and binaries, which are of a non-production environment quality, with less stability than RHEL.
The customers of Vates for it's XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, though XCP-ng likely the affected software, are likely looking for re-assurances that the disruption would be managed.
-
We are very well aware about all of this. But we are not a distro entirely based on RHEL at all (again, all the network, kernel, storage and compute plus many other things are NOT coming from RHEL).
On a personal point of view, I'm a strong proponent of Copyleft licenses and the greater good, in the original spirit of free software. To me, there's a real moral contract between the software editors and the users. You can read my detailed opinion in this blog post: https://virtualize.sh/blog/the-moral-contract/
Due to those personal opinions, I'm really unhappy with RedHat move (and behind Alma and Rocky), but this is NOT clashing with our position for the next major release. So no, we won't be directly disrupted by this move.
