RedHat announces the death of CentOS.
To quote the article:
In the past, CentOS has been a community build of the current RHEL source, providing a robust production distro for those willing to do without Red Hat support. When RHEL gets a fix, the project aims to have the same fix available for CentOS “within 72 hours” of its release, while new point releases of CentOS come “four to eight weeks after the release by upstream.” In other words, CentOS tracked RHEL.
CentOS Stream, by contrast, is a development preview of what is soon to come in RHEL, focused on the next minor release. Another distro, Fedora, is further ahead and more experimental.
When CentOS Stream was introduced in September 2019 it was described by Red Hat as “a rolling preview” of future Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernels and features.” It is useful for developers testing applications for the next Red Hat release, and useful for Red Hat for feedback on anything not working as expected, but not ideal for production use.
“Nothing changes for current users of CentOS Linux and services,” said Red Hat CTO Chris Wright, at the time; but a little over a year later, everything has changed.
Wright now says that “we will shift our investments to CentOS Stream exclusively on December 31, 2021.” The company “remain committed” to CentOS Linux 7 until its end of maintenance in 2024, but not to CentOS Linux 8.
Looks like i switched to Ubuntu at just the right time. When RedHat acquired Centos i figured their time was nigh…CentOS7 will survive until EOL….CentOS8 will not…at least for now. I have been migrating my own stack from Linux to BSD mainly due to licensing and the monoculture that is developing with RedHat at the core. Notice this move comes soon after RedHat was purchased by IBM. I wonder if IBM is going to try to “oracle” RedHat like Oracle did with Java? My primary firewall for nearly all installs is now PFSense which is BSD based. My primary server installation is now TrueNAS core(formerly known as FreeNAS) which is BSD based. Eventually I intend on moving my hosting stack to BSD…but i will have to be able to fund my own development of the entire stack first, something that isn’t in the cards..yet. I’ll go into my reasoning for migrating towards a BSD system in another post.