Rocky is only comparable to Debian in terms of the licencing model, but IANAL. Both are owned by a non-profit organisation that can't be bought.
Would Rocky survive? Nobody knows - but that's why I said I think Rocky and Alma will pool resources with Fedora in the interests of all. R&A could just rebuild downstream of Fedora and invent their own release cycle, so they may do that.
Not going to say you're wrong.
A non technical answer: Don't interact with other players and don't give out any personal information.
Use a unique and non-memorable username in steam and in game. Don't use any of the social functions in steam.
It's often overlooked that the biggest risk to personal information is the person themselves.
(Obviously you need to give some information to Steam for purchasing, and others have shown other methods to limit what information is sold about you as much as you an. It also depends where you reside - the EU has better protections than most)
All good points and I appreciate and enjoy the discussion.
In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was.
This is possibly a semantic point, but for me, a community distro is owned and operated by the community without any corporate control. All the points yonu make are true and valid, but ultimately, Centos is owned by a very large corporate entity that could stop it whenever they want to and nobody else can do anything about that.
Some examples of community owned distros are Debian, as well as Rocky and Alma Linux. Both of the latter have commercial arms, but are are fully independent legal entities owned by the distro. Rocky is owned by Rocky. This point was particularly important because that's what the community thought Centos /was/, but it turned out that Redhat owned Centos. I don't think either of the new distros would have been as trusted if the same thing that happened to Centos - a corporate entity ultimately deciding what happens - could have happened to them. When abandoning a sinking ship, it's prudent to check you're not boarding another with a big hole in it.
I did happen to look follow Rocky's path closely, and our company chose it to migrate our doomed Centos8 machines to, because our developers didn't have time to rebuild everything for Debian in that particular window. That decision was largely based on that legal standpoint because we didn't want Centos repeating on us. It was also reassuring that Rocky was founded by Greg Kurtzer, who founded Centos and had that project effectively stolen from him, and he least of anyone wanted the same thing happening. (BTW, Rocky was named after the other co-founder of Centos, who has since died - a nice gesture)
My cynicism of Redhat and their motives are real and may be misplaced, but I don't think they're done piddling in the EL swimming pool just yet. I adored the company once and had nothing but respect for what they achieved. But that was then and this is now.
You're mixing up Redhat with RHEL.
Redhat is a publicly traded company, so yes, their financials are strong. But my question was about RHEL, which is an internal project and not publically known.
Good question, good to see how others do it.
Mine: A well specced debian server in the garage running a crapload of stuff, including arrs and Jellyfin with Jellyseer, all in docker containers. Playback via debian laptop or Windows desktop using the official apps, and the tv paired with an Amazon Fire dongle running the Jellyfin app. All works really well.
The only problem is my wife sometimes deletes an entire series instead of the series somehow. I honestly don't know how but I've had to download Young Sheldon for her four times now...
Remember when Word and Excel Autosave did what you expected it to?
RH had taken over the Centos project and Board by that time. You're right that Centos was already circling the drain in terms of resources (I remember waiting many weeks for point releases), but the way they did this was brutal and poorly communicated.
And remember those downstream 'rebuilds' only appeared to fill the vacuum caused by Centos disappearing. That they're both doing very well does make you question whether Centos could have been sustained in its traditional form. (As opposed to Stream, which is only of benefit to Redhat and those in its testing cycle)
I actually agree with you, it would survive. It would change, but it's big enough to have that critical momentum.
Historically Fedora has been suggested as a free way to learn Enterprise Linux skills for a career. RHEL now provide free licences so that doesn't apply. Has this hurt Fedora at all? Probably not and may no longer be relevant.
Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.
It would make a lot of sense to Rocky and Alma though - as if RHEL went there would be a huge vacuum and their models would be impossible. I know there was a lot of talk in both companies when the source was paywalled about building directly from Fedora's sources (Alma may actually be doing that, I'm not sure). Both R & A have significant user bases, both Enterprise and Community, and there would be considerable desire to keep the wheels turning. Some sort of collaboration (or just downstreaming directly from Fedora) feels inevitable as a choice if that were to happen.
The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream.
Centos Stream is not community by the way - it's entirely owned and run by Redhat (AIUI, They took over the name from its community origins and replaced the board with its own employees. The vote to end traditional Centos (which was community run) was given as an ultimatum with a great deal of bad feeling) Stream's purpose is as an upstream staging area for new releases of RHEL. Redhat state it's not suitable for production use, so it's of no real benefit to anyone that isn't part of that test cycle. (In some defence of Redhat here, Centos was struggling with low resources for a long time before this and point releases often took weeks or even months to appear behind RHEL)
RHEL don't publish sales figures afaik, so they're the only ones who could say whether they're up or down. I'm just one guy who's worked in a mostly EL based world which has been negatively affected by these decisions, so I'm keeping half an eye. I could be completely wrong, but the facts we do know aren't healthy for someone wanting to enter into a business relationship with them, which is what a corporate company does when choosing a supported distro like RHEL.
And yes, I am quite cynical - you're right to point that out. I also hope I'm wrong. If I'm not, I have a lot of confidence that the world will continue with or without RHEL, but yes, it would be a big loss to the FOSS contributions they have made and continue to make - as well as a lot of good people losing their jobs.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally.
We and several other companies that I know are migrating away from EL entirely directly because of those Redhat decisions. We can't trust them not to be stupid again.
I stand corrected that Redhat are no longer publically traded - I was misled by stock prices showing prices in months, and not including the year.
But that muddies your point even further, doesn't it? We can't see RHEL's value, nor even Redhat's. (And you did mix them up!)