Hi all,
maybe you already have heard it, CentOS is basically dead now. It used to be an exact RHEL clone, but now it's kind of an RHEL beta [1].
Red Hat'er here. CentOS is certainly not dead. This is basically badly timed a) Signalling ;the original announcement signaling this was going to happen was back in August and went pretty much unnoticed/reported due to the Pandemic. And b) Bad timing with the SKU changes and programmes being developed inside RH to make this seem less jarring. Right now those SKU and Programme announcements are still baking and are scheduled for sometime in the first Quarter of next year and really should have been concurrent to the announcement around CentOS8 having a reduced support window. I really hope however those announcements get hurried along by the gathering storm of Stunt media reactions happening.
There is also
https://rockylinux.org/ - which is now live and will follow efforts by the one of the original CentOS community peeps. My guess is that it will be more fork-like than what is baking internally at RH right now.
When we look into why people use CentOS, the reason is pretty simple: it is (or was) binary-compatible with RHEL, just without the support [2].
I was reading comments from people that use RHEL on their production, but CentOS at home or for testing, because you don't need to pay for it.
These use cases now don't work anymore, forcing them into either paying for RHEL, or moving to a different ecosystem.
Streams is currently being used by several very large orgs, and it makes sense to make it really a RHEL-next+ project, which is effectively what it is. Binary compat is mostly a thing of the past in modern Rhel due to containerization. Container tooling in userspace is one of the reasons RH is aligning with this approach. It is becoming hard to introduce things into RHEL base without breaking the CentOS model - so in effect CentOS Stream is really an honest approach. Yes you can debate wether it would have been better to wait until Rhel9 to do this, but the reality is RH has Cadence which is out of alignment with the build and support model of CentOS.
I think for now it is going to be received badly due to a) and b) factors no-matter what unless those announcements get rushed along.
-Joel