Benny Vasquez

We purposely wanted to have you on here. We could have had others talk, and it's not we don't want to talk to them, it's that we want to hear from an engineer that doesn't have a dog in the fight insofar as you're trying to sell something or market something. We want to hear from an engineer who cares about and has been at Red Hat since 2019, is that right?

So you've been there for a while.

Yeah, let's go back to that. We've set the premise that you're a credible person to talk to. You're not selling anything. You're not marketing. Not that they're bad people, but we don't want to be marketed to. We want to hear the From an engineer, from the inside. Layout, CentOS, it's not dead, it's still there.

How that relates to RHEL, how that relates to Fedora, and the whole life cycle of how you get to these packages that people can rebuild off of, and this sort of conundrum of the open source enterprise Linux we live in.

Working differently than what? Differently prior to acquisition.

No, no, no. I mean the acquisition of CentOS open source to CentOS Red Hat controlled.

Because at that time, CentOS was behind RHEL. And the transition that a lot of people got upset about was they were using CentOS as this open source RHEL-like operating system in production, which was the bigger backlash. And then Red Hat's move was to push CentOS in front of RHEL, let it be CentOS Stream.

It's kind of like if you're painting this visual, CentOS used to be behind RHEL.

where RHEL was in front of it, and then it became CentOS Stream, which was in front of RHEL. The innovation was happening in Fedora, landing in CentOS Stream, and then ultimately RHEL as a product.

I'm not trying to like not go into the details.

So it sounds like we're in this... rebuilder world where you have the Rockies and the Almas and the many others, I don't fully understand it.

It seems like from an outside point of view or from a purview sort of point of view that it is more about trying to get what is literally the RHEL product, which is a product, and you can say it's open source and you can get access to packages and RPMs, etc., I tried last night with your help to find a way to download today, in a moment, RHEL. You said it's open source.

I had to sign up for an account with Red Hat. I had to go through hoops essentially to get it. And it may be literally open source, but it's very challenging to play with what is the RHEL product. And what I mean by product, it is open source derived as a trademark product given to customers who pay for it with a license more so for support and assurances and security.

If I want to go play with the product called Ubuntu... What's the latest version, 24.04?

I can go and tap a download link.

Well, LTS.

I can click on it. No account required. Yeah, no account required. So there's no hoops to get to that product, but there is hoops to the rail product. So that's my point.

I'm talking about access, not selling a product in this case.

What I'm trying to say is the angst. The angst is there was CentOS prior to Red Hat's acquisition of the open source project.

Right, this is the RHEL, alternative to RHEL, that's open source, that I can use in production. It is blessed for production.