FreePBX and CentOS base: CentOS is dead from now on

If your dog keeps biting you, maybe it’s time to get a new dog :wink:

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I’d have a hard time seeing the distro moving to something FreeBSD based - I think there’s too much learning and documentation (nevermind all the code) invested in linux based distros. I’m still gathering data and trying to understand options, but my guess is that it’d make a lot more sense to move to one of the more recent RHEL forks, like Rocky or Cloudlinux.

Matthew Fredrickson

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In all honesty the distro itself will do whats best from a business perspective. This likely means remaining EL7 based since it is supported upstream until 2024. Following that migrating to a different EL based distro. Why stay on EL? There is decent development effort to move sysadmin and the commercial modules to a non EL platform. That cost developer time and money without any revenue in return. Everything has to have a business case. There isn’t really one to migrate. You have to justify the cost of developer time, QA time etc.

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CloudLinux Lenix looks to be a good stable future path with no changes for FreePBX.

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Interesting view point on the CentOS changes here: https://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-stream-change-think-about/

CloudLinux OS is a commercial project. Their centos clone would likely be free and have money behind it but that kind of money as seen with other things, typically has strings attached.

A perk of rock linux is that they are building it with the idea of being funded and controlled by a foundation rather than a corporation. Having an independent group managing it ideally prevents things like what CentOS is doing now.

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CloudLinux OS is a commercial project.

Good Point…

IANAL but seem to remember that SNG7 was needed to comply with it’s ‘commercial’ distribution of non open source binaries which CentOS changed the rules and refuted.

I imagine that took a lot of resources, I personally would venture carefully into anything downstream of RH of any flavor.

(Debian as far as I know does not have any known hidden future gotchas or restrictions in this respect)

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After all these years on FreePBX + CentOS/RHEL, I hope the opportunity is taken now to shift to a Debian distro.

Yeah, going to Rocky/CloudLinux Lenix/etc. is going to save a lot of pain.

But we probably need the pain right now just to get away from RHEL - I’ve no doubt RHEL is on the way out.

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Food for thought

That article imagines the development of RHEL as a one-way street where the FOSS community is merely a leech, contributing nothing in kind.

We all know that’s a lie. RHEL depends on the efforts of unpaid volunteers, too. It wouldn’t be what it is without them.

Surely a few people remember the original Red Hat, before EL?

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A few people remember Andrew Tanenbaum publicly tearing Linus a new a$$hole for writing yet another monolithic kernel operating system.

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Surely people remember how CentOS was going to die back in 2014 and RHEL save it?

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It wouldn’t be 2020 without any additional surprises wouldn’t it?

My gut reaction makes me think this will be similar to how LibreOffice was started. Hence, I would think Rocky Linux would be the likely avenue, depending on how it goes.

Could always look at the licensing cost impact or going to the darkside of Oracle. Or simply move to a Debian distro.

I saw this video on the YouTubes and thought this was a good summary.

Chris

centos stream actually a “beta” version, bugs should be often, maybe not so suitable for productive server.

probably freepbx team should consider to swift to ubuntu server. We already did some swift from centos 8 to ubuntu server 20.04 LTS on some projects.

At least FreePBX should support both centos stream and ubuntu server at same level.

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+1
We are using Freepbx with Debian since many years without any problem.
If it is done, it would be the opportunity to buy some commercial modules for some of our customers (impossible to do today due to Centos)

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I think dicko nailed it. For Sangoma to go forward with any distro, it has to have some method of taking care of / licensing commercial php modules. Any adjustments to the php code in moving to a newer version of php is just the cost of doing business in my book.

I’m hoping that Sangoma will find a method that is portable/supported enough that it also works with ARM processors as well.

Jay

Sangoma needs to just get on with dumping the Zend solution that the Schmoozecom team saddled them with. As I do not write PHP that I need protected (not a software dev), I have no idea what solutions are out there. But one would assume that there is at least something.

This should be able to be done outside of OS decisions.

FreePBX itself doesn’t require Zend, only the commercial modules do. The distro is NOT required to run FreePBX. The distro IS a commercial product in place to ensure commercial modules work and are supportable.

The way forward as discussed above is ioncube which is in process. This was in process before IBM/Redhat announced the CentOS changes.

The distro will likely remain on an EL derivative because all of the commercial modules are written around it. As mentioned above the distro is a vehicle for the supportability and usability of commercial modules.

Why CentOS? Blame trixbox

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