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WhenCentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates like traditional CentOS Linux releases. 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.

true that, Redhat just does not acknowledge the fact that CentOS was a good test system for RHEL. We use RHEL in Production and CentOS in test, it was a good solution because:

1) you don't really want to pay licenses for tests systems

2) you want a test system which is 1:1 to the productive

our decision will most probably be to switch Linux distributions and choose some distribution that can at least offer me a possibility to operate systems with decent costs not having to pay for testing.

We use SLES on a part of the infra and wouldn't go there again.

We have been forced to Canonical because of available expertise amongst support personel, same reason we used CentOS: there are a ton of RH admins to draw from.

That's ridiculous. Ubuntu is 100% production-ready, no problem. There's also a cleaner version without cloud-init, if you'y.re referring to that - but when you've got hundreds of servers it might not be a bad idea using it anyway.

To summarize: at this moment I have to pay for my Redhat production platforms, everything is normal until then. And I must therefore forget the stability (we cannot trust Redhat for more than 6 years a priori) but I have to test and participate in correcting bugs in my future production version or pay for my development, training or labs platforms. So I have to do on my no-prod environments what I already pay for my production platforms? What a motivating change and deal....

It would be insane to get mad when they finally decide to stop. All I can really say is, thank you so much for letting me have it as long as I did. It certainly increased the quality of my professional life.

My employer has a paid RHEL subscription, but we developers often use Centos in VMs and for ad-hoc tasks because of its simplicity and availability. I personally often spin up a Centos VM while working from home, and build and package our proprietary Ruby RPMs (which work differently to 8 modules - multiple versions installed at the same time), and we later deploy the same RPMs to RHEL knowing it will work the same. I also authored my recent Ansible on Centos at home to later use on RHEL.

Outside of work I am about to update a single C6 VPS to C8 for non-commercial internet hosting, but all of a sudden Ubuntu LTS, like I am running successfully on my Raspbery Pi is looking like a better (safer) option.

You should be, IBM basically buy stuff to cash cow it and run it into the ground by not spending money on development. Notes and Domino is a perfect example of that and their failure with SmartCloud, as well as leaving those customers who were silly enough to purchase SmartCloud in the lurch after selling the lot to HCL.

But the bigger crux is the public image. RHEL doesn't want to be projected as someone objecting to a RHEL derivative available for free. While, at the same time, they see such clones as a serious problem to their revenue stream.

Centos gets the "Red Hat Way" in front of new developers all over the world. Those developers, not the companies that hire them, will chose their platforms. Centos' binary compatibility with RHEL has been a critical factor in the success of Red Hat.

It's more like 80 instances of RHEL and 120 of CentOS. But those 80 RHEL licenses are not windows licenses because the company could save money on the dev and test environments. Once those become expensive, companies are going to save on paying these Linux engineers and go all Microsoft.

Yea right... A few companies may find it worthwhile to shift to Windows, but the entire web is not going to shift to Windows just because of IBM/Red Hat. Other production-quality distributions exist. There will be more jumping distros than jumping RHEL-> Windows.

Your statement is absolute bollocks!!! CentOS has given more value to RH itself. Steal isn't a appropriate 'word' mate , you sound like a millinnieal from IBM . Its a opensource and GPL covers usage aspects.

First, you are writing in CAPS. It is no good.

Second, before IBM, Red Hat used CentOS to become a standard "de facto" in enterprise grade environment, increasing their revenues

Third, if you are thinking to money, you really don't understand the evolution of software, from free software to slave software.

I wont sign that petition, I can't anymore trust on Red Hat, I dont care about the doomed CentOS, I will all of my will to Rocky Linux and we will learn the lesson: NEVER TRUST A PRIVATE CORPORATION BECAUSE THEY CAN BETRAY AN AGREEMENT!

If they were really worried about production systems using CentOS then they could have just kept developing it but made it dev only with RHEL required for any production system. Then again if there is a free development version of RHEL then fair enough.

I fully agree. It seems that IBM has torpedoed CentOS and this project is now sinking. It is sad. The future CentOS Stream feels like beta release of RHEL. Not for production and stable environments. We are looking now to switch to Ubuntu LTS or Debian. Good bye CentOS.

This is incredibly disappointing to see. This way I can have a constantly unstable system. Do they think this will mean MORE RHEL sales? Cuz I think it's a good way to make your customers migrate away. Amazon Linux 2 is free.

+1 This. I work at a Red Hat partner in Finland and even we get a lot of customers asking for CentOS (higher education, public organizations). We might end up upselling them to RHEL eventually but if they start moving straight to Ubuntu, we cannot even make an offer. RedHat is shooting its foot with a shotgun on this and in a small country might just shift things so much that entire ecosystems gets flushed out with it once enough time passes and adoptions rate plummets.

Some years ago when went through the hassle of switching all our workstations from OpenSuse to CentOS to have binary compatibility with our servers and eliminate some of the hassle, but it seems that all goes into the bin now. Bad move, RedHat, bad move. With stream being in front of the main RHEL version, binary compatibility just went out the window!!

This decision has forced tons of devs to start panicking overnight; just about everything has been built on CentOS, whole business models are based upon the cost of $0. I'm sure the thought was that RedHat and thus business-daddy IBM would reap the rewards of people moving to paid RHEL licenses. The reality is precisely the opposite. SUSE and Debian will be big winners here, not RedHat.

This is a Server OS not a beta testing OS looks like I will be looking for one of the new distros that will be made by how many people you have offended and businesses that can not accept this as a solution including my company.

Basically Red Hat (under IBM) will become another Amazon (AWS) in the sense that both companies love to take gpl software and milk the community without giving back to it - AWS is notorious for this, Red Hat not so much. But clearly things are shifting in that direction.

Hello to all.

This arbitrary measures from IBM/RH affect all Centos users, I have seen initiatives from the Centos founder and other to create more RH clones. In my humble opinion, Linux does not need more distros, what it needs is a very trusted and reliable Linux OS for web servers, truly open source that will not succumb to the temptation of being purchased by greedy corporations, that only cares for money not for users and a good OS. We need only ONE Outstanding, Reliable and Stable Web Server Operating System, just ONE. Please no more confusion and dispersion in Linux, divide and conquer is what we do not want nor need in the Open Source field, we are already plenty divided. Please let us unite efforts in just one platform. My 2 cents.

Thanks and Regards

The CentOS logo and board seems to have wider audience than spion logo and idea of the RedHat Enterprise Linux. The CentOS was believed to be supported by CERN. It is a pity that the solid confidence and 10 year support were shutdown. Though, It is still good distro for making your webserver or to use it for small servers.

There isn't any sense. Why would anyone use the 'downgraded' CENTOS (CENTOS Stream), which is similar to Fedora that has been there for decades. They will certainly switch to Rocky Linux, ORACLE Linux, HP Linux, AlmaLinux...

Hopefully an idea slightly less dumb than this announcement... could someone far better at scripting than me write a DNF plugin that tracks the RHEL source release repo and blocks any Stream binary packages that don't have a corresponding RHEL source RPM?

I place myself in the hobbyist / enthusiast category as I have my own domain for which I host at home 2 physical Centos 8 Servers - one is a mail & web-server, the other an FTP & VPN Server - granted it doesn't have the same level of importance as a commercial production server BUT I have shed blood, sweat & tears setting them up, tuning them and writing many, many scripts to get it to the level where I am satisfied. If I do go the Centos Stream route I guess I will have to take more regular offline "dd if=/dev/sd? .." images - especially prior to Kernel updates etc.

Agreed. Seriously not cool, Red Hat. I've been a Red Hat user since Red Hat 4.1 (and that's before RHEL), and have been a dedicated RH/CentOS/Fedora user since then, and even steered my employer from using a random pile of distros to standardising on RHEL and CentOS.

I have just slammed the brakes on the planned upgrade to CentOS 8 as we have some CentOS 6 systems in production that need to be migrated. Looks like, for now, 7 it is, and see what Rocky Linux looks like.

However, the minus points are that there is no equivalent to the CentOS-Powertools repo, and their build of the kernel packages are such that the VirtualBox Guest Additions only builds on their UEK kernel, not the RHCK (Red Hat Compatible Kernel), as it's missing a header file in the build. Only Oracle would mess it up such that their own product fails.

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