 Jack, a question if you don't mind supposed to be an official session. So this case with some people interested in testing our Linux, but at the moment they use some packages from CentOS plus repository on CentOS Linux, which will disappear soon. So I was searching on how to contribute some of the patches that we have in CentOS plus repo to do a pull request, but I don't see your Git repository for all the packages. So is that closed at the moment? Yes. So you're going to hear about that next week. Okay. So the background of it is that the build system is coupled with Cloud Linux and build system. So we basically had to decouple them from each other so that they're one build system for whatever Cloud Linux wants to do, and then we have our own public build system. So pieces of it are already on GitHub, but not everything. So we're actually in the process of doing it, and I don't know if Eugene is our release engineering lead who told me that he was going to be in here. I don't know if he's in the chat or not, but if you are, I don't know if you want to say anything about it. Jack, I have a little bit of an AMA Linux civics question. So how is this thing governed by the community? Who runs it? Who leads it? Who controls AMA Linux, the entity of AMA Linux, the project? So who controls it? The AMA Linux Foundation controls it, and we have a board of directors in place now that include myself, that include a couple of other. It's like that. It's myself, it's Igor, who is the CEO of Cloud Linux and Eugene, who is the head of release engineering. Cloud Linux. He also works for Cloud Linux. Then we also have Simon Phipps, who's a former president of the OSI, and Jesse Asklund, who is the VP, I believe he's VP now, our director of customer success for Web Pros, which is the company that does C-Panel and Plesk. Then we have Benny Vasquez, who is the community person, at Chef, and so it's like a balance of people inside, people outside, and hopefully what our plan is, is that within a month or two, we can actually hold elections and the Cloud Linux people can fall away, and we can bring in outside community members so that community can actually help with the governance there. Jack, what is this Cloud Linux? I've never heard of it. Yes, so Cloud Linux, was someone going to answer? No, I was just saying, what is Cloud Linux? Yes, so basically Cloud Linux is a company that produces a rebuild of Vrel, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff added into it. It targets specific sectors, so one of them is VPS providers, web hosts, stuff like that. They were the ones that started the project, and they actually gave the founding grant to the foundation so that we can get the foundation off the ground and have money to operate. So what happens is you're taking Vrel, and you're rebuilding it as Vrel, but instead of besides just making Vrel and putting a white label on it and saying, oh, look, this is a generic equivalent of Vrel. Here you go, like what CentOS was. Are you doing anything different besides just saying, oh, look, it's the generic unbranded white label version of Vrel. Are you doing anything different so that you don't just have just a generic white label, anything else can make generic things? Well, no, I think we aim to be a white label in a sense because a lot of people rely on that white label to exist for different workloads or different workflows or different things they do. So a lot of people are not comfortable with using Stream, and so they'd rather go with something that has stable point releases. Why would somebody want generic? Why don't they want a generic? All right, so Paul, let me reframe all of this because... This is unnecessarily pejorative, so it's not about genericness or whatnot. It is really about the fact that for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a product to exist and for all of the stuff that we enjoy in the community to be possible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux are gated on a subscription, and so you agree to a contract in which you don't reshare those unless you want to have your contract expire and you lose access to future updates. Thank you, Neil. However, let me finish so everyone else understands. So, however, Red Hat graciously, they don't have to do this. Mind you, the GPL obligations do not require them to do this, but they make the sources freely available for everyone. They push it out onto the public internet and anyone can inspect it, look at it, modify it, and distribute any builds based on it minus the Red Hat branding, which is actually all clearly marked and clearly well understood, clearly. So the thing is for a lot of folks, it is difficult to acquire Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They can't necessarily afford it. And this is something that Red Hat is finally starting to address. So you see more and more programs about making Red Hat Enterprise Linux available in more spaces for more people and more use cases and more and more things. And that's great and all, but there's still this segment of those that they cannot be served and home users can get like 50 licenses for free and stuff like that. Not everyone can use that. Right. So you start to become a company that doesn't have money, for example. Right. And there are limitations as well because so, for example, if you want to, you know, a natural part of the business is if you want to build a product that you have to, you know, do tight integration where you're making heavy modifications and stuff, you want to have top to bottom ownership of the stack. This is actually the original reason Sentos existed more almost 20 years ago was that the companies that previously relied on Red Hat Linux and made heavy modifications of it wound up having engineering and tooling to be able to build a Linux distribution. And so they did. And over time, you know, you know, these people have moved around like Cloud Linux is the number one of those companies that does that sort of thing. And they build a Linux distribution built on the user-based platform, but with their own customizations and such for supporting their use case. And that is Cloud Linux OS. Now, fast forward to now where like Sentos, classic Sentos Linux is going away in favor of Sentos Stream, a more inclusive, more engaged type of project as a whole. Some people either have misinformation or don't fully understand what that means or like have, you know, different requirements or whatnot. Yeah. These things make it so these things are what make Alma Linux attractive in that sense. And Alma Linux, their value add to the chain is that they keep they bring a value in making it the Red Hat ecosystem more accessible to people in environments where maybe they can't necessarily get well. They can't necessarily use Sentos Stream for whatever reason that keeps them in the fold. And the added value for Alma Linux that for having all the links in our ecosystem versus many of the other community rebuilds and whatnot is that they actually have engineering resources that they turn around and provide value to the rest of the ecosystem by contributing back through Sentos Stream through Red Hat to Red Hat engineering in other means and have direct relationships where this stuff like works out for the benefit of everyone. Yes. And so it's not really a question of is it generic Linux or white label Linux or whatever? No, every Linux distribution that does their own branding is a branded Linux distribution in their own right. They have their own values, merits, philosophies and so on. Like you wouldn't like, OK, I if you turn on the generic branding in Fedora, you do have generic Linux because it's literally called generic Linux. But other than that, this is it is basically it's not a question of whether it's a white label or whatever. It is a question of. Is it is it similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in providing you the same user experience that you want and need? And in this case, at a price point that some that some can only afford, which is nothing and and all the Linux provides that that offering. It's very nice of them. Yeah. So now they're not doing it for nothing at all, because, you know, the aspect of this is this still this is valuable for the community, it builds reputation, it builds quality, it builds an ecosystem and cloud Linux still has to build that limits distribution to serve cloud Linux OS pulling that out and making it all the Linux also benefits them because it brings a larger community of folks using and contributing and validating and and using and allows them to share fixes and things like that. And that makes the whole stronger. And so that's really what this whole stop generic white label. It's still it's all community project, for that makes sense. So, Jack, thank you, Neil, for explaining. Jack. Sure. I'm wondering, is almost Linux like does almost Linux support all the same technologies as Red Hat? Does it have anything that's added? Like, does it have any extra repos and extra stuff that Red Hat does not have? Well, for right now, one thing that we actually just put out a little while ago is some live media. So, you know, things like that, that we places that we can play around in without hurting our compatibility to upstream is where we'll do things like that. But but, you know, in terms of the distribution itself, I don't think anything there will ever deviate from what rel is. So, rel is commercial, all my Linux is a re spin, the same exact thing without the branding, it's accessible to everybody. And I'm wondering why did sentos decide to go to a like a lower tier version of Fedora, something in between rel and all my well, it's not it's not. They didn't go to a lower tier version of Fedora. I think that this is something that a lot of people have a lot of confusion about. And I see Neil chomping to jump in. I wouldn't mind answering this one. And in the most basic answer, I think that one thing which people don't realize is a lot of people and by a lot, I mean, seriously, a lot of people were using sentos, but not contributing anything back to the project, even if they wanted to contribute, there was no avenue for them to do that. It was a closed book where you get what you get and you don't get upset. Yep. And it was it was problematic for a few reasons. And the most basic reason is that that's not how a community works. You in a community, you don't just consume and don't give anything back. And I think that what Red Hat was trying to do. And now, again, not going to say this didn't piss a lot of people off. A lot of people got pissed off about it. A lot of people still misunderstand it. But what Red Hat was trying to do was try to take what they had, which was a bunch of people that were just using it and not giving anything back and turn it into something useful where people now had an avenue in which they found something wrong and could actually help make it right. Whereas before that was not available. Yeah, why would why is everything closed books with sentos? Why do people not want to contribute? Why do people just read like windows? Because it was it was basically it was basically downstream. And so there was nothing that you're basically getting a finished product. Let me jump in here. Right. You're you're you're saying it very politely and kind of sugarcoating it. I'll I'll be a little bit more blunt. I'm a very person before CentOS stream. CentOS as a community project was a failure completely. There was no way to contribute to it for the extent of the community was a few wonderful bless their souls. A few helpful individuals in IRC and on forums telling people, OK, well, here's how you set up that piece of software. You found this bug or this doesn't work. Well, that's what it is. That's how it is in rail. You can buy rail and follow support case if you want to get it fixed. And that was the extent of the community. There was no way to influence the distribution really. We had six, but they were they had very low participation and very low uptake. A lot of the SIGs were just rail product groups rebuilding and testing their next version in CentOS because but because of with CentOS moving to be being a community of consumers to a community of contributors where people can actually contribute to CentOS in order to get changes into rail, that change in itself means that the new rebuild distributions like Alma can be more successful than the classic CentOS ever was. Yeah, because there's not because it's not because it's kind of funny. It's like why are people why is there an invasive species count of consumers? Why are there so many consumers in the community? Why aren't we getting more contributor consumers? Contributors, why are there so many consumers? Why aren't they contributing? OK, OK, well, Paul, Paul, the the core answer here is that at the nicest way to put this is that there's a 10 to one consumer to contribute a ratio, generally speaking, roughly 10 to one, sometimes a hundred one, if you're wildly successful. But the thing about CentOS is that from the early, early days, when people wanted to get involved in the project and help and contribute in that sort of thing, they were rebuffed and and the culture became such that there was no desire within the project leadership. This is pre-Red Hat. All of this is pre-Red Hat. There was no desire within the project leadership to make a community out of it that where people could contribute and build it up and stuff like that for various reasons that I'm not going to get in because they're not important and they're dead and gone. Today, one of the well, not today, but when the Red Hat acquired the CentOS project, one of the major goals there was to build a pathway for supporting a contributor community around the enterprise Linux ecosystem. So note that I said enterprise Linux ecosystem and not enterprise Linux itself. That was that's a very important distinction. Yep, the interest groups and such like that were copied over from Fedora to provide a way for the upstream projects that make Red Hat products built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux of an avenue in which they could develop and provide to the community at large using CentOS as the base, because that way they could avoid giving rel for free to people. Now, fast forward a few years, it turns out that strategy is a failure because people don't people don't really have the ability to build things without being able to modify everything that it builds on. And so what we wound up having was a ghost town of special interest groups that basically are shills for Red Hat product teams that wind up doing whatever the heck they want on top of it and then have back channel efforts to get stuff done inside of rel that get pulled back into CentOS that ship within the thing. And that's just like not effective on top of that, you have like basically no interest from anyone in the wider community to do anything with the CentOS project. And your bus factor keeps your lottery factor keeps, you know, whittling down and down until you get to like one. And that is not great for a project that is supposed to be successful as a community enterprise operating system. When there's no community around it, you don't get anything. So yeah, a drastic change had to happen. And so that was the introduction of the CentOS stream sub project in 2019. That whole point of that was to reinvigorate the the ecosystem and shift the focus from building around to building into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And that strategy was only partially successful in the sense that it got a nonzero amount of contributors. But the general attitude around the project, that particular sub project was met, and in general, it didn't really attract anything with that all set as context. Then it becomes very clear that there is no interest by Red Hat in CentOS as a project as it currently stands. So something had to change. And again, don't work for Red Hat, don't know anything. I am just speculating out of my butt here. Your two choices basically wind up being either CentOS changes or CentOS dies because it makes no sense for you to basically stick a fork in your own product by giving it away without differentiation. And there's no value in supporting this thing if there's nothing to get out of it that benefits Red Hat as a company and the ecosystem at large. And so I like to elaborate on that point again. I know what you're saying about motivations. The old CentOS under the old model, Red Hat acquired, Aqua Hired is what we say, like they hired all of the CentOS core contributors and acquired the trademarks in 2014, I believe. And that was to provide a platform for all those all those real products to have SIGs to develop on. But as far as the core distribution itself, there was no incentive for we've famously been understaffed and there was no incentive for Red Hat to invest in the staffing for building CentOS under the old model. We're changing that with the new model where all rail developers are now becoming CentOS developers. And Red Hat is incentivized to staff up the CentOS efforts properly. That is the big benefit from our side. Moving the the white label rebuild work outside of the company provides a big benefit because other companies that see more value in that than Red Hat do can invest appropriately in it more than Red Hat ever would themselves. Carl, so can I go? OK, so so Red Hat is so so the Red Hat developers are CentOS developers. So what do you mean by that? All Red Hat developers are becoming CentOS developers while developing Red Hat. You know what I'm saying? I'm just a little bit confused on what you mean. So so before there so before there weren't really CentOS developers, there are a few of us engineers that were rebuilding the rail package sources. If there was a problem reported to CentOS, we would just say, you know, is it is it reproducible on rail, then we're bug for bug compatible and there's nothing we can do. We don't even understand this source code. We're just we know how to rebuild our PMs and deliver and compose a distribution. Whereas the individual rail maintainers that are responsible for writing, though, a lot of times they are participated in the upstream projects. They are they're building, writing those spec files in the first place. They are now whereas before they could just look at Fedora and rail and ignore CentOS entirely, now they are actually participating in CentOS and they are the CentOS maintainers for that specific package. CentOS engineers are still involved in putting the distribution together. But now we actually are working with the rail developers that are that are subject matter experts on those individual packages that getting them involved and they're answering CentOS bugs now rather than us just throwing our hands up and saying, we don't we don't know what this is. We just know how to we just know the RPM rebuilt correctly. Yeah. So rail is not real. So so what makes? Hey, Paul, I just want to cut you off. I think we're a little bit over time and there are other sessions. So I let's let's pop out of here and maybe we can meet in the hallway or something like that. I actually I got to take my kid to the doctor as my wife is frantically texting me. So I'll pop in. Let's move to the hallway for this one. But we can go to one of the hallway tracks. Yeah, I hope your kid feels better. Thanks.