IBM's Vicious Attack on CentOS Has Left CentOS Forums Dead
As just noted by Stephen Smoogen:
If you try to go to the CentOS Forums, you will instead be directed to the status page. The CentOS Forums is sadly one of the resources that went away the the end of CentOS Linux 7. The system was a classic PHP web-forum which had been run for over a decade by volunteers as a resource for the CentOS Community. Due to its age, and its usefulness, there have been several requests to get it back up and working. However, it looks highly unlikely for several reasons:
- The service was not actually ‘owned’ by the CentOS Project. It was set up and run by various volunteers who were associated with the project but was never a ‘core’ part of the project. So when Red Hat ‘bought’ CentOS in 2014, this service was not part of that merger.
- The volunteers who were running the service mostly left after CentOS Linux 8 was end of lifed earlier than thought on 2021-12-31. Many in the community had thought the operating system would have a 10 year lifetime like earlier releases, but Red Hat decided in 2021 to focus only on the CentOS Stream versions.
- The remaining volunteer announced that they would only support the system until the end of CentOS Linux 7 in 2024. Announcements were put on the forums that the service would be going away.
- The contents of the forums could not be transferred to the CentOS project (aka Red Hat) because the contents were never licensed under a license which would allow for it. Basically any post on the forums was under the copyright of the poster and possibly licensed to be viewed on that forum only. Moving the posts and documents on the forum would have required getting the permission of every individual poster where many of them may no longer be contactable.
- Various parts of the database are also covered by the GDPR, ‘Right to Forget’ and similar laws around the world. Because again the licensing of the forum was fairly informal, it was thought that transfers would need further legal review.
- Even putting the service in a ‘read-only’ format would have required continual maintenance for a PHP code base which would have needed porting to a newer operating system and toolkit. [Doing dumps and rewrites for forums tends to end up with unreadable messes unless a lot of extra time and effort is done.]
Had IBM not fought CentOS (to make RHEL proprietary), the above resources would still be alive, even if administered by volunteers. IBM doesn't mind "genocide" of information. It claims to only care about money*, even if it cannot understand what financial damage this attack on CentOS is going to cause.
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* IBM would even work for Adolf Hitler if there was money in it. We know it would, as it actually did this before.