Comment by sixdimensional
8 months ago
I would wonder if paying for a legal fight to recapture the trademark is even worth it.
Couldn't Synadia just fork what they want to and rebrand for a commercial new product, and go forward from there?
If they wanted to backport or keep contributing to the open source project they could, or leave some parts open source going forward, while forking only the server for example, to do that.
Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).
> Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).
RHEL contributes to CentOS now more than ever.
CentOS started outside of Red Hat (2003), and didn't get any direct contributions from Red Hat. It built from RHEL sources, which is an indirect contribution that didn't involve any Red Hat employees. Later Red Hat hired most of the CentOS maintainers (2014), and contributed to CentOS by paying their salaries and providing hardware resources, but that was where the contributions ended. This was the status quo until 2021, which is when RHEL maintainers were onboarded to CentOS, drastically increasing the number of people working on CentOS.
I was not up to speed, there seemed to be a period of time when CentOS support was dwindling and it even looked like the project might no longer have upstream support.
Regardless of the complex history of CentOS, RHEL, etc it seems like the original thrust of CentOS lives on rebranded as RockyLinux for example.. and CentOS stream serves Redhat's needs/purposes.
I think forking still is a valid method to resolving challenges for NATS here.