Carl George

It's challenging. I'll give you a throwback to one of your older episodes when you interviewed Adam Jacob. Sure. Fantastic interview. And he brings up the point of, like, you make a product and you sell it. You don't give it away for free. I agree. Ubuntu's model is that they are giving their product away for free, which there are pros and cons to that.

And I'm not going to... I don't want to criticize another company's business model. You know, I wish them all luck. I've got friends that work in Ubuntu and work for Canonical or ex-Canonical. But the... You know, it gets back to that problem. You can have all of the market share you want by giving away your product for free. And it's hugely successful and popular.

But then I know that my canonical friends have told me before that Ubuntu's biggest challenger was always free Ubuntu. Like everyone that's getting it for free because they can and the conversion rate of people that are like should be paying for it to help sustain the engineering of that product is a vanishingly small number.

And it's extremely hard sell to say, here's why you should pay us when you can just get the product for free. Right. So Red Hat tries to take a different stance.

Well, the access is the same thing, right? Because access is part of that subscription, part of that product.

And a lot of that is confusion, right? People looked at it as, this is the free access version.

What would I tell you if, what would you say if I told you that, one, it was never blessed for production, and two, that there's even a website... It was marketed as that. No, it definitely wasn't. Show me a page that says it was blessed for production. But anyways, that's a tangent.

That's what people said. There was no blessing, right? But that's a minor point. Yeah. There's some nuance to it. There is nuance there. That's not the point I'm trying to get to, though. What would you say if I told you that I can show you a page right now on the Red Hat website that says RHEL is not intended for production? We had this conversation last night. I'm down for it. Yeah.

It's because on the page I'm talking about, it's in the product store where they say it's a self-support rail where you can buy just access to rail and can't file support cases. And it says this is not intended for production. Because... Red Hat thinks that you should have production or support for your production instances. It's that simple.

So when they say that, you know, there's also a blog post that says CentOS Stream is not designed for production or intended for production because it doesn't have support. It's around that part, but it's been misinterpreted to say even Red Hat says this isn't good enough for production. Right.

And there's other interviews with other Red Hatters, like from the Fedora Flock Conference, Brian Axelbeard, he said that just because we don't say you should use it for production or we don't intend it for production, doesn't mean you can't, and there's lots of companies that do. I've got some friends over at Meta, Facebook, their fleet is probably the largest fleet of servers in the world.

I think the last PR approved term they got to use was millions, plural, of instances. And they're running CentOS Stream everywhere. and they get on the new versions as soon as they can. They're active contributors, and they're deploying this stuff regularly. They use it at massive scale in production. So it certainly can be, it's still rail-like, and it can be used in production.

Right? And there's even more detail to that. We talked about that partner ecosystem stuff. The whole idea of being real compatible is because they want access to that ecosystem. The real brand name.

Yeah, a little bit of that. There's some of the confusion, and that's going on now with the whole automatic and WP Engine stuff around brand name and how you identify that. But the bigger thing is... They're like, oh, I don't care about having RHEL. I care about this app I can install, and it works on this hardware, that whole ecosystem.

That is what they're buying into, and that is what Red Hat sells. As a product. Yeah. Which I'm cool with. I get that. The whole idea of being exactly RHEL compatible is the idea of getting a foot into that ecosystem and taking advantage of that ecosystem from people that did not spend decades building it and countless dollars building it. Right.

Yeah. And that conflation is a sticking point for a lot of people.

What I realized around that angst is that We made all those changes, and some of it predates me, some of it was right around when I was getting hired. But what I learned about the CentOS community was they're basically two different personas. And it kind of splits evenly in the lifecycle. They were the people using CentOS in the first five years of the lifecycle.

New version would come out, they would say, yes, I want these new features, I want these new capabilities, and I'm also frustrated. Those happened to be the same people that were frustrated that they couldn't contribute to it and make changes to it. Then there were people kind of using it in the last five years instead of using RHEL. For them, it was just the free, unbranded RHEL.

They were never going to contribute. They don't care about being able to contribute. They just want to get the product for free, and they want it to be maintained for as long as possible. So those two personas were kind of where we unintentionally divided the community.

People that liked what we were doing with CentOS Stream, being able to contribute, and it still has a five and a half year lifecycle, which, I mean, that's the same thing Ubuntu LTS gives you without the pro subscription, five years. So it's still a pretty long time. It's still an LTS. Those people, they're like, yeah, I like these changes. This makes a lot of sense to me. And the people that...