In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn’t care. They just don’t want community contributions.
Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn’t be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don’t want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can’t decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying “it is already decided” “Fedora is doomed” etc.
Why would they accept PR at all if they don’t have a robust testing process and approvals are dictated by customers needs?
The message as it is now to potential contributors is that their contribution in not welcome, unless it’s free labor that financially benefits only ibm.
Which is fair, but the message itself is a new PR issue for red hat
I read it, and I read the messages from the devs. The communication issue I am trying to point is also highlighted in the comments: if the decision on merging a PR is uniquely dictated by financial benefits of IBM, ignoring the broader benefits of the community, the message is that red hat is looking for free labor and it is not really interested in anything else. Which is absolutely the case, as we all know, but writing it down after the recent events is another PR issue, as red hat justified controversial decisions on the lack of contributions from downstream.
The Italian dev tried to put it down as “we have to follow our service management processes that are messy, tedious and expensive” but he didn’t address the problems in the original message. The contributor himself felt like they asked his contribution just to reject it because of purely financial reasons without any additional details. It is a new PR incident
But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don’t engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I’m not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
I’m making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I’m just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That’s been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
The Apparently is already patch on fedora… Just reporting other comments in this thread.
But why do they accept contribution to centos of they don’t want patches that are not economically beneficial to the company? It is a pretty bad message written as this
Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.
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In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn’t care. They just don’t want community contributions.
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Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn’t be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don’t want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can’t decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying “it is already decided” “Fedora is doomed” etc.
I stopped recommending it. It is a pity, but there are alternatives
Why would they accept PR at all if they don’t have a robust testing process and approvals are dictated by customers needs?
The message as it is now to potential contributors is that their contribution in not welcome, unless it’s free labor that financially benefits only ibm.
Which is fair, but the message itself is a new PR issue for red hat
deleted by creator
I read it, and I read the messages from the devs. The communication issue I am trying to point is also highlighted in the comments: if the decision on merging a PR is uniquely dictated by financial benefits of IBM, ignoring the broader benefits of the community, the message is that red hat is looking for free labor and it is not really interested in anything else. Which is absolutely the case, as we all know, but writing it down after the recent events is another PR issue, as red hat justified controversial decisions on the lack of contributions from downstream.
The Italian dev tried to put it down as “we have to follow our service management processes that are messy, tedious and expensive” but he didn’t address the problems in the original message. The contributor himself felt like they asked his contribution just to reject it because of purely financial reasons without any additional details. It is a new PR incident
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Not having resources to test it right this second isn’t “doesn’t care” it’s just a lower priority.
Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.
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But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don’t engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I’m not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
All the control and all of the money.
Besides that, I suspect they have no clear vision. And if they do, they are absolutely terrible at communicating that.
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I’m making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I’m just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
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I don’t think so, you are probably getting downvoted because you said exactly this:
And seems somehow offended that I replied to this statement trying to explain (not necessarily justify)
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That could have been better communicated though. What you said is reasonable, what Michal said isn’t as much.
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That’s been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
The Apparently is already patch on fedora… Just reporting other comments in this thread. But why do they accept contribution to centos of they don’t want patches that are not economically beneficial to the company? It is a pretty bad message written as this
It will get to CentOS through Fedora. Always patch as far upstream as you can.
Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with CentOS Stream and its purpose.