CentOS Board - meeting minutes - 2020-03-11
CentOS Board - meeting minutes - YYYY-MM-DD
Attendees
Actions
Decisions, resolutions, and agreements
Agenda + Minutes
Public minutes
Attendees
KB
Jim Perrin
Karsten
MikeM
Ralph
Tru

Guests
Chris Wright
Deborah Bryant
Rich Bowen
Brian Exelbierd
Actions
ACTION: (Carry all actions from notes below up to this section)
ACTION: Karsten to convene a special Board call in 2 weeks; public agenda included
ACTION: Board needs to say from it’s perspective what the Red Hat Liaison role is
Decisions, resolutions, and agreements
Agenda + Minutes
Chris Wright discussion
CentOS Stream as area Red Hat is making investments
Staffing appropriately
RHEL 9 true manifestation of the vision of stream being the leading edge and defining direction for RHEL.
more than can be in RHEL 8 cycle
how does transition work?
RHEL 8 work was intention
getting to all the packages, how?
Stream transition
- when a rhel major release transition happens, what happens?
what is response to 'overnight cliff disruption'?
this is a critical dialog and with feedback from userbase
keysigning etc.
Basic timeline
Want to be at end of this year working in a model where Stream is in existence; concepts around Stream-focused SIGs to augment/layer capabilities; actual interested partners and users == clear flagship users; have all the community build infra set, ready to go; think about the end of this calendar year, this is all coalescing.
2021 CentOS Stream becomes a real focal point for the CentOS community; where things are happening, interesting, etc.
Have some conversations around RH Summit 2021
Then proof of concept around taking contributos
Then from details of what it means to make and take a contribution
Late Spring, early summer 2021 work out contribution model
Late in 2021, a whole collection and momentum around the development of an ecosystem focused around Stream
Really becomes a central part of the overall Project
This is the RH mindset
Tru: What does this mean for runway between versions for developers?
Want to move to Stream being the distro
Stream being the world Red Hat is participating in CentOS, and the commercial distribution RH produces
MikeM: What is the transition like?
Chris: what does the overlap look like?
Moving from a EL8 to EL9 based stream is not chaos, that would kill the premise if it went wrong
Jim - 9 stream would be prominent, but 8 stream users would still continued to be able to pull for a transition period
Take an action to do the updae, yes
KB - have to keep it usable, not sacrifice the userbase.
What is the evolution model going to look like, what does usable look like?
Many people installing right now are expecting the long time between updates
If we’re changing the model, we need to work that through.
Chris - in a different world than in Fedora/rawhide
Not fundamentally invasive, but yes between major releases
When to kill the clone?
Chris: Starting at RHEL 9, there is no derivative
What does it mean for C8?
RH wants to see that one end, too
RH has put some thought into this, today’s world & tomorrow’s world?
Mapping from today to tomorrow for all groups
We have the main use cases figured out
Labs, partners are looking good so far
Reasonable understanding of
Mechanisms for making RHEL more accessible for certain types of use cases it’s currently unusable for
E.g. openstack or FDIO community, they target an RPM built artifact in their CI system, they currently cannot use RHEL due to subscription agreement. That could be addressed.
Change how we interact at RHEL level, rather than CentOS level.
Can’t only take care of some small %
Collaborate on how we segment on user community
KB: how does Fedora relationship change in what that things remain reasonable?
E.g. hyperscalers such as Facebook use CentOS, how does that work with the Fedora ecosystem?
For co-collaborators, the story is great
Fedora is evolve the distro, CentOS is stabilize for product?
Still same marketecture diagram
Fedora is still upstream, leading edge OS level changes location
Still base for subsequent Stream and major RHEL release comes from
Stream about moving the stable platform forward
Chris’ condense:
RH focus going forward is on Stream
From RHEL 9 forward that’s the way whole process will work
For 8, RH expectation is to meaningfully move the userbase to a Stream focused world and not keep the longtail of the rebuild going.
Johnny: I don’t have a problem with that conceptually, but the community is going to have their own feelings
That work is going to be picked up e.g. Oracle, and they start bleeding off all the biggest userbases, how does that benefit IBM or Red Hat? What to do about negative press? And diluting the userbase?
Chris: this is our biggest concern; we don’t want to introduce this to torpedo CentOS. 
Johnny: don’t be surprised when it happens
Sensitive to this as an outcome, want to do whatever RH can to maintain ideally all the userbase.
Not going to be 100%, but can we make it an acceptable loss.
Johnny: ideally we wouldn’t cut off the EL 8 rebuild
Chris: RH ideal is to do that within 8, cutoff then
Balancing disturbing with moving that userbase forward or to a landing place.
Mike: no subterfuge intention, however, we have not been talking publicly about this other part of it. We’ve only been talking about the awesomeness of Stream. In response, we’ve seen a lot of concern that this is a prelude to killing the rebuild. So we are holding back for PR reasons. But it wasn’t clear to me that it was impossible to talk Red Hat out of killing the clone.
Tru1:54 PM
as an end-user : prove that c8-stream works fine enough, and I will move to c9-stream, if you cut off c8-stream before eol rhel8, that will kill centos, imho.
Rich Bowen1:56 PM
Early, clear communication to the community, is so important, so that they can plan. When can we start preparing the community for what's coming?
KB - if we can prove that Stream is useful, then we can move forward without mincing words and without causing a panic.
Users care about the experience, not the version number
Can we carry that along
Tru2:02 PM
thanks for being honest for terminating c8 ni the medium/short term
Tru2:05 PM
hope for RH that c8-stream will take off, but I am not so optimistic, but I am am not RH, so I probably have all the rlevant info for that urgent need.
What Chris needs
Document role of Liaison, so RH knows how that role can be used?
What are things we Liaise on?
Can Board take an attempt at writing down Liaison role?
Jim:
What is RH’s interpretation of the role? Then compare.


Update on logo redesign
Website redesign
Ask Tuomas to help guide the other designer through the approval process, cf. logo?
What else?
Update on Pat & Thomas
Who wants to sponsor each of them? 2 volunteers needed
Thomas all lined up
Pat conversation with Bonnie, Garry hopefully coming next week
Goal is to have them closed and announced before end of March, on the April call
Update on IRC channel
Bylaws memory?
Rolling (last from 2020-02-12):
(Private) Trademark Guidelines review:
What works & what does not.
What do we want to get fixed; who wants to work on that.
(Private) Advisory Council - discussion toward a proposal - discussion draft
On hold while goals discussion is held, which includes a review and update of governance. We’ll figure out what model we want from that and how this idea might fit.
Any other topics aka What other things do you want on our master initiatives list?
Stepping-up our meeting norms
(Private) New Board members
Transparency initiatives
Public minutes
On YYYY-MM-DD the CentOS Board of Directors met …

Narrative summary of what was discussed.

In support of these efforts, the Board came to the following decisions, resolutions, and agreements:

Item 1
AGREED or
ACTION
…
Item N
AGREED or
ACTION

Present at the meeting:


(Guest)


(Secretary)


(Chair)