CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

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This is awful. It&#x27;s proof of the downsides to the IBM acquisition, which I think we all knew was coming. Imagine if you were running a business, and deployed CentOS 8 based on the 10 year lifespan promise. You&#x27;re totally screwed now, and Red Hat knows it. Why on earth didn&#x27;t they make this switch starting with CentOS 9???? Let&#x27;s not sugar coat this. They&#x27;ve betrayed their users.<p>I personally run a CentOS 7 server (as do members of my family), and was planning on upgrading them all to 8. Luckily, I didn&#x27;t get round to it yet. I guess I&#x27;ll have to consider an alternative. For my server I want a boring, stable OS, so I&#x27;m definitely not using Streams. This is going to ripple throughout the whole industry, as CentOS is used all over the place, from regular home users to businesses (and things like CloudLinux).<p>It&#x27;s very disappointing that Red Hat can&#x27;t see the damage they&#x27;ll do not only to the community, but to themselves too. Someone will come along and take the CentOS user base, and it won&#x27;t be Red Hat :(.

There&#x27;s lots of negative reaction going on, but this has happened before. CentOS grew out of RedHat Linux going away and Fedora being the feeder for RHEL. At the time there were a bunch of competitors that were building the RHEL source. CentOS ended up &quot;winning&quot;.<p>I fully expect this to happen again. CentOS will wither and die because no one actually needs the cutting edge repo -- Ubuntu has a way better process for this. RHEL is build on open source. They publish their SPRM packages. A bunch of people will grab these and start bootstrapping DentOS and everyone will move to this. IBM will be sliced up by PE and RedHat will be owned by someone else. 10 years will go by and RHEL will acquire the leading &quot;DentOS&quot; and today&#x27;s DevOps will be tomorrow&#x27;s greybeards and will patiently wait for EentOS to emerge.

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight.<p>Shocking, because I&#x27;d never imagined they&#x27;d kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it&#x27;s killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I&#x27;d thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever.<p>Blindingly obvious, of course, because Red Hat bought CentOS, presumably with real $$$, and IBM bought Red Hat for $34bln.<p>What&#x27;s going to happen next? Microsoft buying Canonical and all businesses running either IBM Linux or Microsoft Linux? Crazier things have happened...

From their FAQ [0]:<p><pre><code> Q4: How will CVEs be handled in CentOS Stream? A: Security issues will be updated in CentOS Stream after they are solved in the current RHEL release. </code></pre> So a &quot;front runner&quot; for bugs but not security issues.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;centos.org&#x2F;distro-faq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;centos.org&#x2F;distro-faq&#x2F;</a>

When I got started in business in the late 2000s, I was constantly fighting for Debian vs. CentOS, and eventually was forced to concede -- 95% of my customers wanted to run CentOS, all the more so given the exceptional conservatism of the telecom industry. They were attracted to its promise of long-term support and longevity, and, perhaps more vitally, it&#x27;s what all the other organisations who sought an &quot;enterprise-friendly&quot; distribution were running.<p>Over time, much of my tooling and deployment processes has come to presume CentOS. If the customer base overwhelmingly runs CentOS, you build process for CentOS.<p>Thankfully, though, Systemd--for all its faults--has narrowed the painful deltas between Linux distributions enough that a switch back to a Debian target won&#x27;t be too painful.<p>Where&#x27;s your God now, &quot;CentOS is something we can depend on, it&#x27;s not just a rag-tag band of open-source hippies&quot;?

Wow. I kind of new this day was coming. I work in engineering &#x2F; science (not comp. sci or developing) and all our software vendors are Windows or RHEL support only. Although if you know your way around linux any flavor will do, but RHEL is the &quot;standard&quot; for support. It&#x27;s kind of like &quot;insurance.&quot; We expect this to compile &#x2F; work for RHEL and NOTHING else, because RHEL is stable, predictable, and boring.<p>I&#x27;ve run most all the flavors of linux and am on the Ubuntu train. Actually, I flirted with the RHEL &#x2F; Fedora &#x2F; CentOS workflows as current as last year for a few months. I love the predictability and stability of RHEL on workstations and the thought of something new on a laptop or what not. While I respect the hell out of RH and their products, it just didn&#x27;t work for me. Fedora is WAY too experimental, lacks supports, and is prone to your system breaking. I know, I know, it is pretty stable and has a lot of support behind it. But after updating via yum and having my WIFI stop working on my 6 year old Thinkpad, that is a deal breaker. I think there is way too much disconnect between their projects. RHEL is super stable, but the packages are severely outdated. Fedora is too experimental, and is pretty much a home operating system and a playground. I know CentOS is free, but depending on your business is paying $300 &#x2F; year &#x2F; machine for legitimate support and ticketing really an issue? That&#x27;s for everyone to decide on their own. I think Ubuntu LTS is the best middle ground for stability and new packages. And if you need paid support and professional help, you can pay Canonical as well.<p>I could see this coming. CentOS didn&#x27;t really show a value proposition for RH picking up the tab and supporting it. CentOS was recompiling RHEL and shipping it off; RH needs to keep their PR and image inline and HAD to help, since the whole point of CentOS was &quot;this is RHEL without RH graphics and copyrighted material.&quot; IMO, RH felt like they were doing the same thing twice; producing RHEL, then removing RHEL branding and helping package up and compiling CentOS. Due to this, I think the biz folks scratched their on why they needed money, and now we have Centos Stream. I have no doubt another project will spin up taking up the slack of just recompiling RHEL.<p>Different tools for different jobs. Maybe Centos Stream will be awesome! Maybe it can fill the gap between Fedora and RHEL.

What was the point of Red Hat taking over CentOS then?<p>If they&#x27;re just transparently killing of the &quot;free version of RHEL&quot;, that surely won&#x27;t work in anything but name? There&#x27;s an obvious need for a 1:1 RHEL clone, and due to the license of all software that RHEL builds on, there&#x27;s no way IBM or Red Hat can stop people from actually building their own &quot;new CentOS&quot; and many companies and communities have done so in the past.<p>All we have now is Red Hat taking the CentOS branding and running with it. And even that point I don&#x27;t get - they could have done this with plain RHEL or Fedora branding too.<p>I get why Red Hat or IBM doesn&#x27;t like CentOS&#x27; existence, but I am fully expecting this won&#x27;t kill &quot;CentOS the concept&quot;. This sequence of events boggles my mind really.

&gt; CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021<p>Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? Weren&#x27;t maintenance updates meant to go to 2029? What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then?

Seems like some folks are considering to create an alternative:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.centos.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;future-is-centos-stream&#x2F;#comment-183642" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.centos.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;future-is-centos-stream&#x2F;#com...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join.slack.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;hpcng&#x2F;shared_invite&#x2F;zt-gy0st6mt-ijgUaSvfdeEOhfXXfIstrQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join.slack.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;hpcng&#x2F;shared_invite&#x2F;zt-gy0st6mt-ijg...</a>

Having a more &quot;front runner&quot; distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don&#x27;t end up in RHEL. This front runner role was actually intended for Fedora however Fedora contains way too much experimental changes for anyone to seriously try to run it on servers.<p>I don&#x27;t want to sound too &quot;tin-foil headed&quot; but I guess now that RedHat has hired the main CentOS dev(s?) this change comes from RedHat. I can&#x27;t imagine the CentOS user base wants this direction for the CentOS project (or maybe thats just my lack of imagination...). People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don&#x27;t want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

To be honest, I think this is bs. The CentOS community is huge and RH benefits a lot from the discoveries made by the community.<p>However, doing this will effectively make CentOS as a server OS useless for the most of us. &quot;But Facebook uses it&quot; - well, yes, with thousands of engineers Facebook could run their own distro and still have success if they wanted. Most useless argument ever.<p>Time to move on and find something else. Maybe good old Debian.

Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but the way I read this, CentOS Stream will still serve as a stable clone of RHEL just as it always has. The rolling distro will be tagged at a certain point in time for a RHEL release, and you can still choose to use that state as your production base, and be locked at that tag. Presumably there will be a CentOS Stream 9 tag that you can use for production. The difference will be that CentOS will lead rather than follow the RHEL release.<p>I think the doom and gloom is a misunderstanding.

So basically, instead of CentOS being as stable as RHEL, they&#x27;re positioning it in between Fedora and RHEL stability. Basically the Debian Testing branch for RHEL.<p>This is just a rebranding move to push businesses that were using CentOS to actually buy a RHEL license, lol.

So CentOS is no longer relevant for production use. I wonder who stands to benefit. I really don&#x27;t see it driving more sales to RHEL like the execs probably predict.

I m torn about this move. My gut reaction was that this was a bean-counter move. Thinking more about it the key issues I see with this move are:<p>- CENTOS fills a need, that many users have and superficially it looks like Red Hat (IBM) is now abandoning addressing it. On the other hand Red Hat does offer RHEL for free (gratis) [0] and that should fill the needs of CENTOS users (right?). However it would have been much better if that option was mentioned in the announcement.<p>- I thought Fedora was upstream of RHEL. However after thinking more about it I realised that RHEL has a significant delta over Fedora. I &#x27;m guessing CENTOS stream will be partway between Fedora and RHEL. It makes sense from Red Hats open development approach to have the delta between Fedora and RHEL happen in the open. Done right that should strengthen RHEL.<p>- Why the rush to drop support for CENTOS 8? I m sure some people are using it in production and they are unlikely to to want to move to this new CENTOS stream. It&#x27;s a new OS distribution with a philosophy different to the one that was right for them!<p>Overall I &#x27;d prefer if the new thing was called RHEL stream and provided for free (gratis) as CENTOS stream is. Also making more explicit the RHEL availability for free instead of having competing brands would be good. Now that there are competing vendors (Amazon Linux, Oracle Linux) trying to entice users it&#x27;d be better to strengthen RHEL brand rather than dilute it with multiple offerings. Unless RedHat&#x2F;IBM plans to pull the plug on option [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.redhat.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.redhat.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;no-cost-rhel-d...</a>

Sounds like CentOS Stream will bring the pain to users and admins. Going forward, the answer to every stability question will be &quot;maybe you should go buy Redhat&quot;.<p>I had a bad feeling about the CentOS project when Redhat became involved as more than an upstream RPM source. I hope CentOS isn&#x27;t turned into another Fedora.<p>I&#x27;m sure many of you will be happy to tell me that I&#x27;m wrong. Please do.

I don&#x27;t like those news. CentOS was my &quot;go to&quot; distribution which I used by default if RAM was enough (it has surprisingly high requirements to install). I know it well. I&#x27;m using RHEL on my home server with developer license, but that allows only for a single instance, and I have more hosts.<p>My ideal outcome would be if they would allow using real RHEL for any hobby projects and for commercial projects with income below some threshold, so I can start and grow with RHEL and then switch to paid option when I&#x27;d have enough income to warrant it.<p>But it&#x27;s IBM, so probably I&#x27;ll have to switch to Debian which is good enough, but I&#x27;d miss SELinux, better systemd integration and more polished packages.

&gt; If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.<p>Not exactly unexpected, but disappointing: if you want to continue using something like CentOS, pay for RHEL. Lots of web hosting providers will be quite concerned.

From Red Hat&#x27;s release:<p>```There are different kinds of CentOS users, and we are working with the CentOS Project Governing Board to tailor programs that meet the needs of these different user groups. In the first half of 2021, we plan to introduce low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities and expansion of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription use cases to better serve the needs of systems administrators. We’ll share more details as these initiatives coalesce.```<p>Probably should have had their ducks in a row there to announce both things at once, I think.

Q5: Does this mean that CentOS Stream is the RHEL BETA test platform now? A: No. CentOS Stream will be getting fixes and features ahead of RHEL. Generally speaking, we expect CentOS Stream to have fewer bugs and more runtime features than RHEL until those packages make it into the RHEL release.<p>Q: is the sky blue? A: no. it&#x27;s blue.

I used to work for a hosting firm who had large numbers of customers making use of CentOS for their pre-production environments, running RHEL for their production.<p>This announcement is a kick in the teeth to those customers, as the transition to RHEL 8 for these pre-production environments will feel very much like a shakedown.<p>I feel this is tremendously damaging for Red Hat&#x27;s reputation and the goodwill developers had towards them.

The writing&#x27;s been on this wall since at least 2014, when RedHat took over CentOS. Having a free gateway to your paid product is fine, but at some point you need to give potential customers a nudge they can&#x27;t refuse.<p>Pre-2014 it was fairly obvious that a full clone of a commercially supported product, with the proverbial &#x27;just a search-and-replace of the product name&#x27;, was going to attract interest &amp; action from upstream.<p>OTOH in the ~25 years I&#x27;ve been using Debian, I&#x27;ve never been (rudely) <i>surprised</i> by one of their announcements. Their social contract [0] is clear on every point that&#x27;s relevant to users of an OS, especially users looking to commit long term to a platform.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debian.org&#x2F;social_contract" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debian.org&#x2F;social_contract</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this means that another project will crop up soon-ish which does what CentOS did before, rebuild RHEL so there is a stable, boring distribution for people who want RHEL without wanting or being able to pay RH.

Oh, wow. My whole extended family has CentOS on their machines for years because of LTS. Not sure what I&#x27;m going to replace it with now and how. Perhaps there&#x27;s going to be Fedora LTS at some point soon. I sure hope Fedora is not the next casualty.<p>IBM strikes again.

Having been a Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu person for a long time, and being somewhat dissatisfied with that ecosystem, I recently started evaluating CentOS for my use cases instead. I want something with a non-rolling update model, so I don&#x27;t have to deal with my environment changing out from under me.<p>CentOS 8 had been mostly working well for me, barring a few missing packages that were easy to port over myself, and I was really thinking of moving all my boxes to CentOS. I&#x27;m glad this news came out before I did; I don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;ll use instead, but it definitely won&#x27;t be CentOS&#x2F;RHEL.

<i>&gt; If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.</i> I&#x27;m guessing the MBAs at IBM believe that they can covert a chunk of CentOS enterprise users into paying IBM customers. Ooof! CentOS had a good run.

&gt; CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021<p>Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? Weren&#x27;t maintenance updates meant to go to 2029? What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then?

There is no reason for them to have taken the CentOS name for this role. There is no defense of this, other than to purloin resources or to make it harder to run RHEL-like distros.

Not really the first time Red Hat leaves users high and dry - also happened when they made Red Hat non-free with Fedora (then very unstable) as an alternative. I moved to Debian, never looked back, and today I regret it less than ever :)

Time to EOL all our CentOS platforms and migrate them to Debian.<p>Every time a corporation takes over an open source project it absolutely ruins it. We need some kind of &quot;enterprise open source cabal&quot; of people who can work on open source projects without any IP or copyright going to the company so the companies can&#x27;t unilaterally screw the project.

Hahahaha. That&#x27;s a lesson learnt from me. Giving the benefit of the doubt to IBM? What a naive fool I was. I&#x27;m glad my personal server is running Debian at least, even if I chose it for other reasons.<p>At risk of angering the beehive, I will pre-emptively remove my benefit of the doubt to Microsoft as well before I become too dependent on VS Code and its proprietary extensions. I had been ignoring that red flag and with these news my gut instinct has turned to a fight or flight response.

The value of CentOS is that it&#x27;s provides a free and stable RedHat build.<p>Nobody needs or wants another Fedora.<p>This seems like a round-a-bout way of killing the only RedHat alternative to the expensive commercial version of RedHat.<p>If there is no Centos9, I&#x27;ll probably move over to a Debian alternative. Just because of the principle of the thing. Better that than validate the &quot;acquire and destroy&quot; strategy that seems to be used by every big tech company like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

Very disappointing, since I based my OS decision on their support cycle, which has now been thrown out the window. Guess that I will be going back to Debian again<p>And to top it off, today was the day when a CentOS 8 kernel update broke ZFS. Again.

The real message is that if you want stability now, you have to pay for it with RHEL.

Curious why people on here seem so abrasive to this so far. Have had a few work loads on Stream, and updates are just as &quot;boring&quot; as expected from CentOS.<p>I seam to have more issue at work dealing with older versions of packages on CentOS that lag behind up to date packages on &quot;unstable&quot; distros.<p>As a fan of rolling release (btw I use arch), I will love not having to deal with EOL CentOS upgrades at work.

TL;DR: CentOS Linux 8.x will end in 2021, CentOS Stream 8 will be RHEL 8.x plus whatever updates are in the pipeline for it. CentOS 7.x will remain as today until RHEL 7.x reaches EOL.<p>I&#x27;m very pessimistic on what this means for the RHEL ecosystem as a whole...<p>If I understand correctly, CentOS Stream 8 should be relatively stable just after a RHEL 8.x release, because the pipeline will contain just minor updates. But as the next &quot;x+1&quot; release approaches, the pipeline will contain whatever is being tested for inclusion in it. This makes CentOS Stream unsuitable for the vast majority of people that currently use CentOS in production (i.e. the people that choose CentOS over something else like Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS).<p>One can argue that these people can go buy RHEL licenses, but they most likely don&#x27;t do that already because they see support as the value added by RHEL-proper and they can support themselves just fine. Many will also have RHEL instances along CentOS on systems that need vendor support, but pushing them to license everything may also push them into another direction altogether. Suddenly, standardizing on Ubuntu LTS (with paid support for a subset of instances) starts to make sense.<p>I think Red Hat (or maybe IBM) is vastly underestimating the value of CentOS in keeping the whole RHEL ecosystem competitive. They may be setting themselves up to be another SUSE.

This is quite logical and expected from RH&#x27;s standpoint. The aberration was them acquiring CentOS in the first place. In the long run, I expect everyone to migrate to Ubuntu or Debain slowly. This has been happening anyway. I don&#x27;t think people will trust a new CentOS-like project easily should one pop up.<p>Thanks, for all the fish, CentOS. The city of Tuttle, Oklahoma is grateful.

I don&#x27;t think this has anything to do with the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, but this is something that&#x27;s driven by Red Hat&#x27;s management itself. They did a similar thing with JBoss application server (the community edition) which was extremely popular and used within the community and even in production. Red Hat offered (and still offers) an enteprise version of it (JBoss EAP). Few years back they slowly started diminishing the prominence of the community version. They first renamed it (to WildFly) since the &quot;JBoss&quot; name confuses users with their enterprise edition offering. Then they started adding confusion around usage of the community edition of the server (now named WildFly) and started sending out messages (which never were clarified) that WildFly &quot;cannot&quot; be used in production environments (no explanation of what production environment was). Answers to these questions typically directed users to JBoss EAP (the enterprise edition) where they could enroll in developer programs and use the JBoss EAP for free for development use and then pay for the same when they use that or deploy that in production. This effectively killed the entire JBoss (now WildFly) community (external contributions, user discussions and any such interactions). WildFly these days is just there as a community project for the sake of it. There&#x27;s no real external involvement in it and it&#x27;s mostly driven by Red Hat employees and only rarely see any discussion happening in the open in their mailing lists anymore (can&#x27;t blame them when no one external to their own employed team participates anymore).<p>The thing though is, developers actually involved in this project had strong opposition to the way this was handled, but none of it was heard and the &quot;decision was already done&quot; by people who hardly had any role to play on the day to day community involvement with the project. I am pretty sure it was the same with this CentOS decision.

It does not matter if nightlies are more stable than they used to be. It does not matter if nightlies never crash.<p>If you work in an industry or corporation that is highly security conscious, i.e. that prizes risk mitigation over using the cutting edge or getting to market first above all else, then you won&#x27;t be able to use nightlies.<p>Security policy will dictate that you use use a stable versioned release, that the release be vetted through scripts&#x2F;STIGs, and that the release be installed by Security+ certified and blessed admins.<p>I just successfully pitched we go with Centos 8 at work. Tomorrow I have to go in and explain why we need to choose Centos 7, or Ubuntu. In my industry this kills Centos, it&#x27;s as dead as Mr. Praline&#x27;s Norwegian Blue [1]. I suspect that was IBM&#x27;s intent all along, though it&#x27;s only suspicion.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dead_Parrot_sketch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dead_Parrot_sketch</a>

So Centos 8 will be a beta test stream for features and fixes, but for CVEs it will lag behind RH. That&#x27;s an interesting twist.

It does make sense from RH&#x27;s perspective that when Fedora is a testing environment for the next major version and RH wants to use CentOS for minor version test environment, so that they can release a new RHEL minor version more confidently to paying customers.<p>I assume CentOS Stream will be based on the previous RHEL minor version release which would be stable and puts improvements for the next minor version release before RHEL releases it which doesn&#x27;t sound like the end of the world like some people seem to think.<p>You actually get improvements earlier than later and you also get to throw feedbacks in before the next minor version gets released which feels more community oriented.<p>Unless your server needs absolute stability like RHEL (in which case you might as well just pay for RHEL), then it seems ok to use Stream.<p>For those that need absolute stability but have no decent flow of income, then you might be burned but I suppose a new community supported RHEL clone would come out sooner or later.

Wow, saw it coming at the IBM aquisition but this caught me off guard. I&#x27;ve run them all in production, so getting to brass tacks I say this will push people into either SLE or Ubuntu&#x27;s arms for the fact that these are the two main alternatives that offer both a support model and have high deployment numbers and great teams behind them. I prefer SLE but to each their own. The fact that I have advocated for rolling release as the distro model of the future doesnt negate the many cases where tracking with RHEL for stability is required.<p>That said, I think a lot of issues I&#x27;ve seen would be helped by people not being so afraid of rolling release , so maybe reconsider the fundamentals before being too chicken little. Also, I suspect this could be the kick we all need to start pushing nix and guix more seriously.<p>I like stream. A handful of my side projects are running it now, but IBM done fucked up with this move.<p>ps: please, dont go trusting oracle

I remember setting up and building a 16node cent OS cluster in my undergrad for a special big data paper back in 2012, so sad to see this...long live forks

Well this sucks... IBM&#x2F;RedHat is really shooting themselves in the foot here. Stable CentOS versions have always been my go-to for VPS services. Install it once and you&#x27;re good -- plus no Ubuntu snap stuff... I have 5+ CentOS 8 installs and I was really banking on the LTS timeline. I wish they would have kept that going alongside their CentOS 7 support.<p>I&#x27;m debating whether or not to downgrade to CentOS 7 to at least keep going until 2024, instead of 2021 with CentOS 8.<p>Hopefully, some other player steps up and creates a similar offering.<p>Also, I&#x27;ve been irked lately about them deprecating virt-manager and pushing podman. I don&#x27;t mind alternatives, just keep the feature parity when you switch. Cockpit is fairly limited compared to virt-manager.

How does this affect FermiLAB? They stopped development on Scientific Linux to rebase on CentOS and now CentOS might not be useful for their purposes.

Oh, FUCK.<p>I liked them because I could have a rock solid environment at work and play with technologies with centos at home.<p>Fuck all that I guess. If this is the game then I&#x27;m not renewing my RHCSA certification and I&#x27;ll be considering definitively switching to Ubuntu.

Somewhat off topic: Are there any kind of stateless, managed-for-me server images?<p>I recently set up a digital ocean droplet with the default Ubuntu 20.04 Server image to host my web app. I don&#x27;t like how I&#x27;m in charge of installing security updates and rebooting it (I don&#x27;t really care about downtime), and I really don&#x27;t like how I don&#x27;t really remember what packages and commands I ran to install everything.<p>Presumably, this is what digital ocean app platform is for, where I could just provide a docker container. But the specs of the 5$ app platform container were half as good as the 5$ droplet, and I can run multiple things on the droplet in the future.

This is sad. Our research group runs based on RHEL + CentOS. RHEL for all the important stuff, and CentOS for all the compute nodes. Now, if CentOS 8 dies, there is no way we are running say Debain on compute nodes and RHEL on other servers. RedHat sadly has to go away. It&#x27;s their own way of losing our business, and losing goodwill. Now, the people at university will treat RedHat the same as Oracle and IBM for being greedy and evil.<p>Too bad Scientific Linux was dropped in favour of CentOS. Perhaps scientific community will revive Scientific Linux or something like that. Cant wait for what comes out of this.

CentOS is to be essentially the beta release for the next minor release of RHEL whereas Fedora ELN is targeting the next major release.<p>Makes sense commercially from RH&#x27;s point of view. Boring and stable is now chargeable.

They did say this: &quot;In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better serve the needs of systems administrators and partner developers. We’ll share more details on these initiatives as they become available.&quot;<p>So maybe if this pans out, a lot of projects will now be able to use RedHat EL proper.

Thanks IBM. Now I&#x27;ll have to revisit what OS to deploy at various remote experiments. I suppose this might be the kick needed to revive SL though.<p>They also conveniently waited until right after EL6 EOL...

CentOS Stream is RHEL Testing (like Debian Testing).<p>As stated in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;centos-stream-building-innova...</a><p>&quot;CentOS Stream now sits between the Fedora Project’s operating system innovation and RHEL’s production stability&quot;<p>So if we compare to Debian, this means:<p>Fedora &lt;=&gt; Debian unstable (Sid)<p>CentOS Stream &lt;=&gt; Debian testing (currently Bullseye)<p>RHEL &lt;=&gt; Debian stable (currently Buster)

When RH bought CentOS, it was clear they would kill it eventually, the question was when. Well, it looks like it&#x27;s happening just now. Time for a CentOS replacement.

We use CantOS in production. Our servers are typically replaced once in 3 years. But we update our software stack on bare metal only once in 5 years or so. We however spin up VMs all the time on these servers, and having a single standard operating system base that was extremely stable did not have licensing issues was a positive. This changes the calculus for using RedHat based OSes. So we initiated a migration to Debian.

It actually provides transparency on the development of RHEL and provides one of the oft requested things they couldn&#x27;t; that missing features for a package or a slightly newer version of something.<p>Jim Perrin explains it also here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jperrin.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;thoughts-on-stream&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jperrin.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;thoughts-on-stream&#x2F;</a>

Is this just a ploy to get RHEL licensing $$$ while another project emerges to provide what CentOS used to? The whole point of CentOS was to be a carbon copy of RHEL. Then RedHat bought them and now this...<p>If you successfully fill that void, maybe you too can be acquired by IBM&#x2F;RH in a few years as they repeat the cycle.

Like many my first reaction was shock, but at the same time not surprised. Have even emailed the address provided with feedback as I work for a University which like many use a mix of RHEL and CentOS.<p>As per the FAQ though I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye. Two things strike me: 1. The suggestion that low or no cost options for RHEL are coming for certain categories of user. 2. As much as Stream will be a rolling and &quot;beta&quot; channel, Fedora&#x2F;CentOS&#x2F;RHEL already have testing repos within their release process so Stream may not be as unstable as this might first suggest.<p>With local staged repository mirrors Steam may end up being less volatile than the existing point releases which were notorious for breaking things at times.

I think people are missing something here... this isn&#x27;t going to make a typical CentOS deployment less stable than before. The intended result is to make RHEL <i>even more</i> stable than before, but leaving CentOS in the position where RHEL was until now.<p>Seriously, think about it. Yes, users of CentOS Stream will be essentially be doing beta-testing for RedHat, but it&#x27;s a type of beta testing that until now didn&#x27;t even exist; any instability, conflict, or vulnerability that enters into CentOS Stream is one that would have entered into production RHEL systems otherwise. So the net effect is fewer of those for RHEL, but the same number as before for CentOS. CentOS users lose nothing they ever had.

At the risk of getting hit with downvotes... because its oracle..<p>Oracle Linux actually seems to be the best way out (at least for now)<p>&#x2F;me shudders.<p>Actually just installing it on a new 5900x now after aborting CentOS due to it becoming abandonware and having its name stolen by IBM.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;centos-governing-board-do-not-destroy-centos-by-using-it-as-a-rhel-upstream" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;centos-governing-board-do-not-destr...</a>

I&#x27;ve had a feeling, at least since the IBM purchase of Redhat, that the days of using Centos as a free replacement of RHEL with all the security updates and patches for absolutely free, are coming to an end.<p>You&#x27;ll either be forced to buy licenses or use a far less stable and secure version of stream. Or, of course, you can rent VMs with maintained distros from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. on their cloud platforms.<p>IBM bought Redhat for a reason, and if history is any guide, they&#x27;ll begin aggressively pursuing large companies, governmental, educational, etc. users of Centos and push them to buy support licenses of Redhat.

This marks the end of my willingness to run anything on a redhat product ever again now that they&#x27;ve demonstrated that their commitments are worth nothing in the face of where they want their business to go.

This is bad, but the way things were going for the last few years with Red Hat gaining more and more importance in the general linux ecosystem something like that happening was just inevitable.

&gt;&gt; CentOS Stream now sits between the Fedora Project’s operating system innovation and RHEL’s production stability<p>So if we compare to Debian, this means:<p>Fedora &lt;=&gt; Debian unstable (Sid)<p>CentOS Stream &lt;=&gt; Debian testing (currently Bullseye)<p>RHEL &lt;=&gt; Debian stable (currently Buster)<p>quote source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;centos-stream-building-innova...</a> (linked from the article)

I am not sure how CentOS Stream makes any sense. CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System, how on earth can CentOS Stream be called an Enterprise operating System?

Hmm.. In terms of alternatives, how can we be sure that Ubuntu sponsor Canonical will not get acquired and change the rules of how freely Ubuntu stable versions are available? This whole thing is making me rethink if it makes sense to rely on free unsupported software at the operating system level. I don&#x27;t trust oracle and cloud linux also seems like a commercial company wanting to profit from Linux like Red Hat. Hmmm...

Just move to Ubuntu &#x2F; Debian it&#x27;s the logical choice here. Ubuntu is already the #1 distro on server, it will consolidate that poistion even more.

I’m on the fence.<p>I work in higher ed and happily pay the premium for red hat.<p>We only have about 500 systems in our top 10 research&#x2F;health based institution.<p>I’m really tempted to spin up an in-house replacement for CentOS. Not strictly to defer adoption of RHT, but instead to fill the necessary gap for those who have gone “all-in” with CentOS.<p>Those in higher ed have access to all the necessary components required to produce CentOS. All they need is leadership.

Putting aside what Red Hat wants, it&#x27;s still open source. Why couldn&#x27;t a new project replace centOS as the free alternative to RHEL?

Wow. Disappointing! Wonder if we should trust other Red Hat projects? Like I think podman is cool if I were building my own PaaS type system.

We are creating the next RHEL based Enterprise Linux - same as CentOS used to be. Targeted first release is January 31, 2021.<p>Looking for both volunteers or people who want to be paid for their efforts. Join us to secure Enterprise Linux as a free (as in beer and freedom) for the foreseeable future.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monkos.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monkos.org</a>

This is why I immediately switched our long term plans to Ubuntu after the IBM acquisition was announced.

The end of the era of the most stable Linux distributive for servers. Why it happened. I love Centos so much, but for now I have to decide which distributive I&#x27;ll use in my production and I don&#x27;t want to use neither Oracle or Debian like. IBM made my life harder.

I have a feeling they are going to switch RHEL to the same model that Ubuntu follows, where it’s free to download and use, with no license to worry about or anything, and then there’s an optional support contract you can add to it if you want paid support.

Is this meant to make RHEL more attractive than CentOS because now it will be more stable?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;centos-governing-board-do-not-destroy-centos-by-using-it-as-a-rhel-upstream" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;centos-governing-board-do-not-destr...</a>

A lot of justified complaints here but the Oracle build of RHEL is 100% free and always up to date (I.e. while CentOS still doesn’t have 8.3 out, Oracle had it out 9 days after RH).<p>Yes, Oracle sucks but it’s a better RHEL build than CentOS was.

Well, wasn&#x27;t this the original worry when centos was &quot;acquired&quot; by redhat many years ago? I suppose a new distro that did what the pre-redhat centos did (source rebuilds of RHEL) is what will happen.

What are the chances that someone starts another community project like CentOS where they remove the licenses and stuff from upstream RHEL and distribute it under a new name

If I were running an open source software business, I would simply provide long-term support updates for free and also have lots of money to fund ongoing development.

Among existing alternatives such as Ubuntu LTS, Debian, openSUSE, etc. which is the least likely to meet the CentOS fate (I mean acquired by a large corporation)?

It&#x27;s really sad to see this. I really hope some people take up a mantle and start a continuation of CentOS 8 &#x2F; 9.<p>No mention of OpenMandriva as a alternative RPM distro.

So, I suppose CentOS is dead. As others have stated, another group will have to step up and create another CentOS, or just switch to Debian Testing.

I wonder if it would it be possible to &#x27;dnf downgrade&#x27; a CentOS Stream host to the same package version as a RHEL8 host?

I&#x27;d love to have the original Centos project people doing an AMA and what they (really) think about this decision!

Is CentOS Stream totally unacceptable for traditional CentOS users who don&#x27;t need compatibility for RHEL?

Not obvious who would use CentOS Stream.

How viable is CentOS Stream on the desktop? Fedora moves a bit too fast sometimes, but CentOS too slow.

What will this mean for Fedora? Doesn’t Fedora already occupy the niche of “Redhat-unstable”?

I am down to make a fork, like the original CentOS before they sell out, who&#x27;s in ?

Rolling release doesn&#x27;t mean bleeding edge... Sounds like some of you never update

Interesting development.<p>What&#x27;s the current difference between RHEL and Oracle Linux? Our institution used to be an RHEL shop, but switched to OL -- I just assumed that RHEL was historical at this point.<p>[edit -- thanks for the answers. I realize now that my memory failed me... I mis-remembered that Oracle bought RedHat, not IBM.]

is there any license or other issue (apart from resources) restricting someone to just take on the Centos n downstream development in addition to redhat building stream?

Well, I am still using Debian distro.

Seems like RedHat wanting to make CentOS a less &quot;safe&quot; alternative to RHEL.

You want stability? Pay up!<p>In essence.

Just upgraded to CentOS Stream from CentOS 7, so far so good.<p>Contrary to most commenters, I am actually optimistic. I switched to Arch on the desktop a decade ago because I was tired of having to often nuke and pave my install every 6 months. I am still with Arch all these years later, even for my work machine and I work as a programmer so instability wouldn&#x27;t fly.<p>Obviously the support window for CentOS was much, much longer, but if they&#x27;re careful we can perhaps have the convenience of a rolling release with the stability of RHEL, or close to then more power to them.<p>My only concern is the short EOL window for current CentOS 8 users.

People used to say that it’s possible to make money with OSS because Red Hat does it. This invalidates that already dated argument.

What is happening with open source lately. Just this today I am.reading about QT, CENTOS, MAPBOX, travis all ditching open source. Well I don&#x27;t remember the qt story but yeah.<p>What is the point of offering your software to the community as open source if the only end game is to make people dependent and then pull a fast one on them. Sigh