Red Hat was not expecting the reaction to killing CentOS.
The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated.
I don't know of any other vendor that wraps developer accounts into production licenses.
Notice that this access is in no way promised to the end of support for RHEL 8.
I will say again, Red Hat has terminated two major Linux platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS.
Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a Linux platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. Oracle Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy.
There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different.
The free converters between them should be used fluidly.
I see the decision to convert to CentOS stream as driven by two motivations, cost containment, and facilitating outside contributions by pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability).
I might be misreading these motivations.
With this management perspective, the CentOS community reaction to the retraction of the end of life date, and potential reduction in stability, was likely not anticipated.
> pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability)
CentOS streams is literally RHEL with fixed major version and rolling minor versions. So, in the past, you got CentOS 7.1, then 7.2, etc., with streams, you get CentOS 8.x.
Saying that this is moving away from RHEL stability sounds highly disingenuous. Are you saying you've seen RHEL 7.X to break as opposed to 7.(X-1) version, and your solution was to wait for RHEL 7.(X+1)?
Are we not reading this correctly? If not, could you get Red Hat's CTO to retract this [mis]information?
'Another official part of it is, as [Chris] Wright [RedHat CTO] said, is that CentOS Stream as a "rolling preview" of what's next in RHEL, both in terms of kernels and features can be used in today's containerized, cloud-native IT world.'
> CentOS streams is literally RHEL with fixed major version and rolling minor versions. So, in the past, you got CentOS 7.1, then 7.2, etc., with streams, you get CentOS 8.x.
> Saying that this is moving away from RHEL stability sounds highly disingenuous.
If it were so great, they'd do the same for paying customers. That they don't move RHEL to being just 8.X makes me think that Red Hat does in fact understand that that undermines the stability of the platform.
The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated.
I don't know of any other vendor that wraps developer accounts into production licenses.
Notice that this access is in no way promised to the end of support for RHEL 8.
I will say again, Red Hat has terminated two major Linux platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS.
Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a Linux platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. Oracle Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy.
There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different.
The free converters between them should be used fluidly.