It's generous as long as you ignore the fact that CentOS used to cover all of these usecases without any restrictions on what you could use it for or how many servers you could use it on, for free, with no licensing or registration.
But since we aren't entitled to any free product at all, it seems unkind to criticize someone for not giving as much for free as they once did. It's still generous, even if previously it was more so.
> But since we aren't entitled to any free product at all, it seems unkind to criticize someone for not giving as much for free as they once did.
Like... sorta? On the other hand, they went on the record saying that they would support CentOS 8 through 2029 [0], so I think it's reasonable to be unhappy with them for going back on that even in the absence of a monetary relationship.
Yes, I can understand being upset about it, but think such anger should be tempered by no fee being paid and no contractual obligation being breeched. It seems to me if you're in a situation where you truly depend on such a commitment, you should be paying for a contract with someone, not hoping for the best. Had Red Hat not been supporting CentOS for over 6 years, it may have fallen apart even sooner. Who knows.
So while this is disruptive and bound to be upsetting, Red Hat are still being quite generous with their new offerings. And as far as I know, they are not standing in the way of CentOS replacements such as Rocky[0] or Lenix[1].
It's not a matter of whether a contract was breached. People tend to get upset when trust is broken. I suppose your argument is that people shouldn't have trusted RedHat because no money was exchanged but that's not really how trust works in real life.
My argument is that people should have more reasonable expectations from a free project. That it is unreasonable for a free project that is shutting down to continue to operate until all EOL's are reached, especially til 2029. It's quite nice of them to keep things going for a full year in order that people can make other arrangements.
Once the unfortunate decision was made to shut down CentOS, it would be very nice if the public outrage was tempered with a little appreciation for the 6 years of support that Red Hat gave to it, and also an appreciation for the new options for free access to RHEL they are providing.
We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based.
That's the cost of building a product on GPL2 licensed software.
The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. In killing its core mission, they haven't been.
> We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based.
Are you claiming they are in violation of the GPL license? I believe they still are 100% in compliance.
> The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. They haven't.
They stepped in to stewardship of the product quite naturally, with the full backing of the previous stewards. Nobody was forced into that agreement. It wasn't given to them as a gift, Red Hat has sponsored the project for the last 6+ years. The fact that you disagree with the direction it has since gone, does not mean it's wrong. It may be the difference between having something more modest, and having nothing at all.
And if you want something closer to the original CentOS check out:
> Are you claiming they are in violation of the GPL license?
I'm not, they are indeed compliant, and Red Hat is not obligated to directly maintain CentOS. They are only obligated to provide the source to customers under the terms of the GPL.
However, if Red Hat no longer wants to maintain CentOS in the spirit in which it was founded and taken over, I'd argue the ethical thing to do would be to spin the project back out of Red Hat.
