Red Hat’s Vice President, Mike McGrath, responsible for the development of Fedora and Centos, recently shared the company’s stance on the termination of the publication of RHELSRPM packets in the Git.Centos.org repository. In a blog post, McGrath stated that Red Hat remains a supporter of open development processes and continues to act in the good of the community by opening its code and transmitting changes to upstream.
According to McGrath, Red Hat is valid in accordance with the requirements of the GPL license and therefore proposes leaving the RHELCENTOS Stream repository as the only public source of packets. The CentoS Stream project includes the initial texts of all packages, on the basis of which RHEL releases are formed, and this repository is available to everyone without restrictions.
However, the development of CentoS Stream is carried out in a way where not all the latest versions of packages will coincide with RHEL packages. If there are discrepancies, it should be perceived as an error that should be reported and which will be corrected. Red Hat does not see the value of RHEL and is not obliged to facilitate the operation of the distribution distribution.
But, dissatisfaction arises from the fact that Red Hat invests significant funds in ensuring long-term support for packages, developing new opportunities and launching changes while the creators of the repository resell someone else’s work without taking part in it and not providing anything in return. The distribution of products that completely duplicate other developments and created on the basis of simple rebound, without making their changes, poses a threat to companies specializing in open software, as well as the entire Open Source ecosystem, as they are able to discard open software to a state when it was the lot of lovers and hackers.
However, the developers of the RHEL alternative assemblies, such as Almalinux and Rocky Linux, are dissatisfied over the termination of the publication of the package code on Git.Centos.org. They claim that this will complicate the preparation of completely compatible and identical in behavior (at the error level) of RHEL assemblies, as the Centers Stream repository is not completely synchronized with RHEL. Some patches may not be in packages, some packages (for example, with a core) are published with a delay, and the number of versions of packages in Centos Stream and Rhel do not always coincide. It is also worth noting that the RHEL distribution has been supported for 10 years, compared to Centos Stream which has only been updated for 5 years.