Interview of CentOS Project Leader about Red Hat deal

You probably remember that at the beginning of this year, CentOS and Red Hat announced their joint efforts . However, the Russian-language news did not reveal the essence of this partnership, which lies in the fact that CentOS from simply “RHEL without support” becomes a much broader project. CentOS becomes a platform for a whole range of open source technologies. Then, in January, I translated something “for myself,” but now I decided to publish it, because since then no intelligible information has appeared in Russian. So, the translation of the interview with the leader of the project CentOS. ( Attention, after the article survey. )


For 10 years that have passed since the launch of the CentOS project, he had neither a board of trustees, nor lawyers, nor any commercial activity. The developers who created the “RHEL from the community” worked for free (although some people earned private consultations). The project had only a few hundred dollars in a bank account for organizing events and printing T-shirts with CentOS symbols. The developers did what they themselves needed today, without trying to look into the technologies that will come tomorrow.

But all that has changed after the news that Red Hat itself will participate in Red Hat itself, says Karanbir Singh, the leader of the CentOS project and one of four developers who, thanks to new collaboration, are moving to work at Red Hat. For the first time, developers will work on CentOS professionally and this will “shift the paradigm” of the project and its participants, Karanbir said.
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Red Hat will provide resources and infrastructure for the project. And CentOS, for its part, will become a stable platform for expanding the scope of Red Hat technology, this applies to both RHEL and other software, says Singh.

“We will work to ensure that other projects can work successfully with CentOS,” says Singh. “We will not develop any new features. We, on the contrary, want to push the developers of other projects to ensure that they themselves can do the CentOS assembly they need, without having to learn all the subtleties of building iso-images of the distribution. ”

In this interview, Singh talks about CentOS and Red Hat collaboration; what to expect from the project now; about the role of Red Hat in the community; about the opportunities offered by the partnership; and also about his feelings from working on CentOS as a professional developer.

How did this partnership start? Did you really get a call from Red Hat lawyers one day (as you were joking on Twitter)?

Yes, it was not easy to find the answer, when from Red Hat they called me with the question: “Who are we talking to? Who can you discuss legal issues with? ” We have no commercial interests, so there are no lawyers or a legal entity for partnership. Red Hat came to bring the project to a new level, providing resources and help us achieve the goals of the project. More specifically, we want to combine our efforts.

What allowed you to join forces? Has anything changed in your relationship with Red Hat?

Many people seem to think that our relationship with Red Hat was tense, but it’s not. We always “relied on the shoulders” of Red Hat employees, we took what we developed at Red Hat and tried to make these technologies accessible to everyone.

But one of our problems was that we could not defend ourselves against legal issues. For example, if someone suddenly forgot to remove a trademark, it would lead to a serious violation of the law. The only way we could have avoided such a situation was to work on a project by an organized group without a legal entity. One of my biggest complaints was that the CentOS project could not work in public, because the emergence of a formal organization could have unpredictable legal consequences.

One of the benefits of cooperation with Red Hat is that we can now remove legal issues and become much more open.

What does it mean to become much more open?

There used to be only one way to get into the CentOS team - first the community had to push you into the QA team . You should have known the other participants of the project for several years, you should have many answers on the forum and the lack of commercial interest, then you could go to the QA-team. And only after working in the QA-team, you were among the main developers and received a privileged position with access to the servers.

But now this is all in the past. We are increasing the core team of the project from 6 to 15 people, and the QA team from 60 to 70 people is another qualitative change - which is very encouraging to me - people from other projects who are trying to do something based on CentOS, can come and work on their task with us.

How can other projects start working with CentOS?

We are still working on the details, but the main idea is that we want to see different versions of CentOS. Other projects can add their own “layers” or components and customize the system so that they can create their own solution, for example for VOIP, hosting, cloud computing, data storage, etc.

Initially, we discussed with Red Hat that, ideally, we need one project, which in a few steps would become one of the above CentOS-based solutions. We planned that in the first six months there will be six such solutions. But in the first 24 hours we get 7 options, and then three more.

However, there is one requirement for such options - so that each of them could become a complete solution, a good development team is necessary. We all need to be confident in its further development. Now there are so many discussions about what and how it should be.

What do you hear from projects that want to work with you?

Looking back a few years ago, you will notice that many developers have found a stable operating system for their software on CentOS, but the lack of SLA and any guarantees stopped them from widespread use of CentOS. Now they will take our project into their ecosystem and together with us will implement the necessary improvements to them in CentOS. They will know the history of every bug, every feature and every patch.

This option will allow them to go along with the CentOS project. They will accompany only what they themselves need, without worrying about other parts of the system. Similarly, 40 different projects can use Apache, but only one person is needed to support Apache, and all others can concentrate on their tasks.

What benefits will CentOS get from this partnership?

New people will come to us and we will be able to expand the ecosystem together. There are so many things, the prospect of which would be very doubtful if everything remained as before. People whom we do not personally know, it was very difficult to participate in the project. Now these barriers are destroyed.

Do you think that changes in the organizational plan?

We had certain levels of organization, but not to such an extent that a full-fledged board of trustees to manage the project was obtained. It's great that Red Hat understands how the OpenSource community works. For example, every day, Red Hat employees can easily meet IRC and ask some questions. Now our processes and procedures will become clearer and more transparent, this concerns both access to the infrastructure and code. In the next few months, everyone will be able to participate in the project and make decisions with us.

We were not a software-oriented community; we were a problem-oriented community. Eighty-five percent of the time we did the same things. In other words, only 15 percent of the time we did something new, important for the developer community.

The changes that occurred in the project did not appear there because someone had a big idea about the need for this in the future. They were aimed at solving the problems that exist now. For example, many are trying to build IaaS or adapt CentOS for some other promising technologies. Our approach was that if they are smart enough to deploy such systems, they definitely do not need our help.

The CentOS project in the form in which it is now remains unchanged, but we will work to ensure that other projects are successful with us. We do not want to bring any new features to the platform. We want to make as simple as possible the introduction and construction of what you need, so that you can make your build of CentOS, without having to learn everything about creating iso-images of Linux distributions. People will work together on similar problems.

Will CentOS become a testing ground for new technologies at RHEL, as some commentators have suggested?

I think, in a sense, yes. However, it would be a mistake to think that this would be a testing ground for RHEL. Rather, it will be like a foundation for a wide range of open source technologies. We are creating a stable platform that you can take as a basis and not fear that it will cause your problems. There is nothing that limits us to the development of Red Hat. For example, we see a great potential for cooperation with the Xen Project and Red Hat is not yet involved in this.

We hope that the fruits of our work will find their place in RHEL, but we are serious that the platform is not limited to the specifics of RHEL.

The CentOS 6.5 release took place in December - what about the next release? How will the new partnership affect it?

Despite the fact that I now work on Red Hat, I am not privy to what they think about the release plans. Therefore, in the next few months, the CentOS project council will publish its own roadmap. The main line, the core of the project, will remain unchanged. Well, various projects with which we will cooperate will be able to write their own “road maps” for their CentOS variants (based on the release plan of these projects).

Most importantly, we will try to ensure that in the CentOS installer users can choose which of the existing CentOS options they want to install. But this is still in the “wish list”, which needs to be more clearly defined before developing.

What are your personal plans in Red Hat - what can you do in a company out of what you could not do while remaining an independent developer?

Ten years ago, when we were just about to launch the project, our goal was 300 users, and this figure seemed fantastic to us. At that time, from our point of view, this would be enough for success. Now we define success as creating something that will unfold us to a user-centric approach. We think about how it works, where it works and in general, how well it turned out from the point of view of users.

I have never worked for a large OpenSource company before, but I hope to bring a “user view” approach to Red Hat. I will try to focus on the user community and due to this, I hope to better manage the project.

On the other hand, not so much has changed. They sent me a phone and a laptop. I consider it a great honor that now I have the opportunity to focus on CentOS.

Now, do you want to rest for a while or vice versa, to get more pleasure from your work?

Our project never had any money. We have a bank account, but there has never been more than a couple of hundred dollars on it, which we spent to order T-shirts with our symbols for various events. For the first time, there is a group of people who are professionally working on CentOS, as if on a platform.

Previously, some of us went to our main work, and then we worked 40 more hours a week on CentOS. But you will not be able to withstand the 80-hour work week for a long time, so the reason why I agreed to work at Red Hat is not because I was offered a large salary, but because I want to work on developing CentOS.

You wrote on Twitter: “I think this is a great opportunity for Red Hat to prove that they are worried that their approach to interacting with the community would be open, transparent and focused on the needs of users.” How can they do this?

It's a difficult question. Here you have a non-profit community-driven project that unexpectedly receives support. Now we have access to some resources, we can count on people who are available during working hours or some server capacity, for example. This changes the project paradigm, but we want to keep the project in its current form.

You will not feel the difference with how it was before. If there are any objections, let's openly discuss them after the first six months of our work. Red Hat is ready to take on the burden of taking into account the views of all members of the community.

How do you think this partnership will affect the relationship between the Linux community and Red Hat?

I think it will reflect well. Red Hat is already investing a lot in Linux. Many of the feedback I get from people working at Red Hat, both from senior executives and from novice developers, says that they appreciate our work, that within the company there is a strong spirit of openness and community. People working outside of Red Hat do not really understand how OpenSource thinking is rooted in this company.

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