Carl George

do not care about contributing, do not care about getting their bugs answered. They just want to get the product for free. They're like, oh, no, I'm going to go to these other guys that give me the same thing.

The big change is that because it got actually harder on CentOS and Red Hat once the AquaHire thing happened and they were paying the CentOS maintainers because customers would come in and say, well, you're making both of these things, so why should I pay you for one and not the other? Or why should I pay you for the one when this other one's free?

And that conflation of having Red Hat sponsorship, it helped the project not fail and collapse, but it also made it harder to have those conversations, to draw that line between the product and the project. And so now the new rebuilds, like I heard one guy inside Red Hat described it as these changes are Red Hat getting out of the rebuild business.

Like we decided that's not where we want to spend our time. Here's the way that building an operating system works in our pipeline holistically to make a better product. And it's still really close to RHEL and you can still use it for whatever you want to, but it's not going to be trying to match RHEL identically anymore. It's getting six months ahead of RHEL on features and fixes.

But like you said, a lot of those people that are going to different alternatives now, they're in that latter group, the five plus year usage where they just want the same thing. They don't want anything to change ever. And they don't want to think about being able to contribute being a benefit.

They're self-supporting. They're active in the projects. They're contributing. They identify a feature that they want or something that's broken that they want to fix, a bug. and they're contributing that into CentOS Stream. They're active contributors there. They're contributing to upstream projects. I know they're heavily involved in SystemD. They participate there.

A lot of times you'll find talks from them at conferences like Scale where they're talking about the internals of SystemD because they employ a lot of SystemD developers. They have kernel developers, ButterFS developers, all kinds of stuff. So they have a lot of that expertise in-house. Gotcha.

So they're not really, they don't really need to leverage that support any more than just interacting with those communities already. All right. So the future stuff. Juicy future. Juicy. So the major version right now of RHEL is 9. Everyone knows that. Same for all these RHEL-likes and CentOS Stream, which is still RHEL-like. It's all major version 9.

Everyone can count and knows that the next number after that is 10. Is it 10? Yes. Was it eight, nine? I'm making this joke. Go ahead. It's a little silly because there was actually a time before I got hired where there's some weird marketing thing around it where they were telling engineers that they couldn't say that the next version was eight. And I don't know where it originated or why.

Oh, wow. But then, like, some real marketing folks showed up at the, I think it was the Fedora Flock Conference, with stickers with the rocket ship and the number 8 on it. And after, you know, all the messaging to the engineers was like, don't say the number 8. Just say, oh, whatever, you know, whatever the next version is. And so the engineers were all mad.

They're like, oh, these guys showed up with the number 8 on a sticker, and they told us we can't say it? That's so stupid. Like, why do we even have this problem?

I missed that joke. Big company, inner things, whatever. Weird things. The next version's 10. Juicy stuff. Go. So RHEL's on a three-year major version cycle now, six-month minor version cycle. It'll be a little more reliable. It used to be kind of hit or miss, and one of the feedback we got from customers was bringing it back to Ubuntu.

They have their schedule where they're like, yeah, we're publishing this month. You can count on it. And a lot of customers really value that. So eventually, version 8 was when they adopted that in 2019. So three-year cycles, you can see that RHEL 9 came out in 2021. Sorry, 2022. So 2025 is when RHEL 10 is going to come out.

We can't officially say dates, but there's an event in 2025 in the spring that Red Hat puts on that might make sense for there to be product announcements at. Anyone can figure that out just by looking at public websites. It's not that hard. Not that that would be the exact day, but probably pretty close. It's a good time frame to expect it. CentOS Stream 10 has already branched off from Fedora.

It's getting that initial productization to become, to stabilization, to become RHEL eventually. It's in a state now where you can get it and install it today, but we haven't announced it as, you know, ready's a weird word,

I think we usually use launched or released, but there's going to be a launch announcement or release announcement for CentOS Stream 10 pretty soon because it's getting to the point now, it's not that high pace of stabilization. It is, okay, well, we basically have all the features we want.

We might make a few more changes before it gets released as RHEL 10, but it's basically stabilized, and this is what you can expect RHEL 10.0 to be whenever it comes out next year. So we're going to have that announcement pretty soon, probably next month or the month after, where we announce CentOS Stream 10 is here. You can use it now. It's pretty good. We like it.

Also, Eppleton, the thing that I work on directly, we're going to announce that about the same time. Usually when we've announced them separately, we usually have the feedback that, well, why would you announce, you know, If we announce one, immediately the question is, well, I want the other one to use them together. I want those extra packages, and I want the base operating system.

They're useless without each other and a lot of people's opinions. So we're going to do kind of a joint announcement probably the same day or the same week where we say, yep, Apple 10 is here. We've got all these extra things you can add. The community has been building them for the last few months, and we've had the infrastructure online. But we're doing like a flag day, like here it is.

It's as ready as it will be, you know. It's the thing, do we say it's ready at 2,000 packages? Do we say it's ready at 3,000? We're going to keep adding stuff, and even after we announce it, it doesn't stop growing. So we've got those things coming up. And timeline-wise, you can look at it as that's about six months before the RHEL 10 launch.