Yesterday, Red Hat announced that it is redirecting its efforts to CentOS Streams. While the end of life of CentOS 7 is unchanged and lasts until 2024, the end of life of CentOS 8 will expire at the end of 2021 instead of 2029!
This kills not only CentOS 8 (no need to upgrade to CentOS 8) but also CentOS itself!
No project is going to take the risk of starting on a distribution that is doomed in the long run.
CentOS Streams is not an acceptable alternative: CentOS was a perfectly stable distribution, CentOS Streams won’t be by definition.
Who could have made such a stupid decision?
CentOS allowed small organizations to familiarize themselves with the RHEL environment. They accepted the delays in security patches, the rolling updates mechanism that complicates certain processes, the lack of support, normal for a free distribution but they had stable code. If their activity increased, they often switched to RHEL to have a good technical support.
Even the largest companies sometimes used CentOS when Red Hat did not offer any support in an OpenStack Non-Red Hat environment or for their test environment because they did not have a license to subscribe for each server.
All this will disappear and this at the expense of Red Hat itself. If Red Hat thinks that this will bring new customers, I think it is making a big mistake on all levels (image, marketing, sales, etc). Everybody will switch to another Linux distribution or fork RHEL again (Rocky Linux?).
Finally, I have a thought for all the Red Hat employees who believed that their company was different.
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