Carl George

That push wasn't about that reaction. That reaction came later. But yeah, I get you.

Yeah.

That's where we're at now. It was just a really messy transition. Part of that was like rush timelines. That's a compression of a lot of time. Yeah, definitely.

For sure. We don't have a lot of time. And that was the dream originally of it, right? We had CentOS lagging behind RHEL. It was painful for developers. It needed to exist, but we had developers frustrated that, okay, well, I'm making this change, but then it changed in the next minor version, and I didn't find out about it until a month later.

So they wanted to get ahead of those things, and they basically wanted RHEL a little bit earlier than they were getting RHEL-like things in CentOS, in what I call classic or legacy CentOS. The official distro name is CentOS Linux. The way it should have gone down was we just did a clean break at a new major version and said, for example, CentOS 9 is here early and it's different now.

But because of some compressed timelines and people were excited to get it out there, we ended up doing two variants in version 8. We had the classic variant, which was a rebuild following RHEL, CentOS Linux 8, and then we had to make a new name to distinguish the variant, which became CentOS Stream 8. It's still the same basic operating system, just released on a different cadence.

And I can say that because at the time, that was my full-time job. I'm working on Apple now, but that was what I got hired by Red Hat to work on. I was doing those builds. It was still, and I mentioned earlier that the RHEL maintainers are taking over control and doing all that work in CentOS now. The early transition wasn't that way.

The small group of people, like three or four of us that were building classic CentOS, started having to do two rebuilds. The rebuild of CentOS Linux following RHEL, and then the rebuild of CentOS Stream that was ahead of RHEL. and it was really messy for a while until we could get it actually properly onboarded in version nine.

We ended up putting it on GitLab, and so all the rail maintainers would do their packages there, create them, and do all their development, and then there wouldn't be a rebuild process. They would just build it, and it would become CentOS Stream. But in the early days, we'd have builds, They were all rebuilds, we tagged them at different times, basically just released them at different times.

And some of them would be classic CentOS Linux, and some of them would be CentOS Stream 8. But it was all from the same build system, all from the same people, all from the CentOS project. So that's one of the things that irks me when people say, this isn't the same CentOS. I'm like... No, but yes, it is. Like, it's the same people. It's the same project. CentOS isn't dead.

Technically, CentOS is the project. CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream were the distributions. But thankfully, we don't have that double thing anymore. We onboarded all the RHEL people, and it's just CentOS Stream. And I think my personal opinion is that we should one day just drop the stream and just say, yeah, this is just CentOS. Most people just call it CentOS. And let's avoid the confusion.

We should have never had the overlap. It should have just been a clean break in a new major version and leave all the old major versions on the old model. That's not the way the transition happened. Clean breaks are good. Poorly executed transition, in my opinion. Some of it predated me. Some of it I was front row and center and doing what I could.

So it's all open source. And everything in Fedora is just out there in the open, built in the open. There's nothing private. Everything in CentOS Stream is the same way. It's built in the public. It's all public. And you can contribute to it. RHEL, the contribution path into RHEL is through CentOS because functionally the way it works is it's the major version of RHEL.

You've got like CentOS Stream 9 now is where all the RHEL 9 development happens and then periodically they branch that into 9.4, 9.5, 9.6. So you can't actually contribute directly into a RHEL minor version because those are built inside Red Hat. But then the major version, you can get it on there.

So from the developer angle, like you can do pull request to master, but you can't do pull request to the 9.4 branch. Okay. Sometimes the RHEL maintainers will say, yeah, we also have customer pressure to get it in these older, minor versions, and then they can do that part internally. But then the After Effects, it's still all open source.

It's still all published, all compliance with all the licenses. Once you have RHEL, you have access to the source for every package, even the ones with licenses that don't require it, like MIT or BSD license. So it's fully open source, top to bottom.

Totally cool, right? I'll push back on you a little bit. Okay. You tried real quick on your phone while we were drinking at the bar. I wasn't drinking. You were drinking. I wasn't drinking. I was drinking water. Well, very quick attempt on your phone. It's not the same as sitting down like, yeah, let me create this account. I won't create accounts on my phone.

I'm going to wait until I get on my laptop again, right? Okay, let me push back to you then. There's a little bit of a barrier, yes. You have to sign up. Let me push back to you then.

Yes.

Download the ISO. LTS. Sure, your point.