I'm migrating off of CentOS starting in Jan 2023. I've been using CenOS, unsupported, since version 5.5.

icon isn't a burning bridge, but it'll do.

And while I may not have been able to contribute code, I've opened my share of bug reports against CentOS in the last decade and I hope that helped someone other than just me.

Both my company and all the sane clients are migrating to other distros asap instead of any RedHat derivatives. Who knows what else these absolute morons invent next? Betting on Titanic not sinking? You lose.

IBM is trying to squeeze money from CentOS-users and the morons in RedHat are saying a lot of horses**it to cover it up.

They've miserably failed: The "gimme money" is so blatant no amount of talk can hide that.

When millions of CentOS users disappear to other distros, RedHat have to write all their own fixes and *that* costs a boatload of money, work they've so far got for free.

That means also that the quality of RHEL and all derivatives will plummet: It's obviously clear that IBM doesn't let them have enough people to keep the quality: IBM wants *profit*.

Profit is the opposite of quality.

Also, RedHat doesn't have anything to take it from. Too bad, that means that the headcount will plummet. A lot. Death spiral is guaranteed and we don't participate in that. It was nice while it lasted.

So far I haven't seen a single fix done by RedHat personnel: It's always a community favor done in CentOS, not RHEL. Obviously RedHat bean counter refuses to see that: He's paid not to acknowledge community in the CentOS.

"including smoothing the way for people to jump to Stream."

No-one sane uses Streams in any kind of actual work. it might be OK at home computer, as Fedora replacement. "Continuous changes" means there's no way to *test* anything against anything else for a significant time. Typically cycle from testing OS-version in development to production takes months. As it should.

Now: have a stream of changes weekly or daily with no version numbers or *actual package of rpms*: How do you know you've same set of packages you tested against? By listing them all, one by one? Utter lunacy.

Just like putting Fedora, with alpha-level of stuff into production. It's just not done. Obviously the ElReg hasn't realized a bit of that by statement above: It really doesn't make any sense: it's like running windows 11 home edition as business critical application platform: No-one sane does that.

"Just like putting Fedora, with alpha-level of stuff into production. It's just not done."

Hah, you might be surprised about that.

Bringing CentOS in house killed off all of the other RHEL clones because who wouldn't use the (and as near as doesn't matter also guaranteed) official clone.

At some lightbulb moment RH spotted this and realized by moving CentOS from utterly stable to slightly better than Beta would give all the users two options, Pay to stay the same or try a migration with it's unknown level of risk - aka the Microsoft model.

"Pay to stay the same or try a migration with it's unknown level of risk -"

So, summarized: f**k off to the non-paying customers providing 80% of the fixes.

When those those customers leave the quality *will* plummet as it's obvious IBM demands profits and it's not going to invest a penny more to RedHat.

With millions of CentOS users missing, they have to write fixes themselves. That's not cheap.

Which means it's not "stay the same" as the company itself has totally different business model now: "Squeeze as much as you can from customers". Same as IBM. Or Microsoft.

No-one is a customer of either of them if they have a choice. CentOS users have several choices: Migrating from RHEL/CentOS to other distros is not *that* hard. Probably easier than migration from CentOS 7 to 8. I think commenter forgot that even staying with RH *is not trivial*.

Many of our customers are already doing that in development environments, piece of cake for developers. Those migrations will eventually flow into production and then it's goodbye RH: It was fun while it lasted.

Downward spiral for RH started at RHEL7 when they decided to incorporate systemd, a spawn from Microsoft hell with binary registry and all. This is just more of the same: microsoftication of whole company and their products, providing shitty, expensive products just by market share.

I used to prefer CentOS for legacy LAMP servers and stability and then Debian or Ubuntu for less stable but other more interesting projects. Like most sane I.T peeps you use whatever tool is appropriate for a job. Windows for games, Linux for servers, Wii-U for Zelda BOTW, Macs for pretending to know IT, etc, I have a toolbox full of all of the above and each are great for something different. CentOS' rug pull forced my hand in to the "never use RH again" camp despite being a yum trumps apt guy. Now firmly Ubuntu LTS. I have also sat here and consumed far too many beers. NN all you nerds, live long and prosper Luke

yum trumps apt ... I'll agree on that.

But RH basically committed a suicide when they sold themselves to IBM.

Owners obviously got a truckload of money but, all of the greedy vultures out there, to *IBM*?

As bad as selling whole thing to Oracle or Microsoft.

Anyway, the "we want profit and we want it *now*!" from the new owners is showing again. And, as usual, the beancounters in IBM have *no idea* how the relation between RHEL and CentOS was actually working.

Nor does the RH spokesperson here, either. Or he lies to present some made-up BS to cover the planned *money grab* behind this.

These morons obviously believe that most, or even significant part, of CentOS users move to RHEL and pay the license.

While it's trivial to move to other distro. They must be *really* stupid at IBM. And greedy as hell. But that's a given when it's the IBM.

"CentOS Linux was not open source, was not a collaborative project, and was not really a community in any meaningful way..."

Well, first, it certainly was open source; that's why it was able to exist in the first place. That it was neither collaborative nor a community is true, and gets us to the heart of the matter: what people want from software.

Enterprise IT shops want software that their bosses tell them to buy, and they want a golden support contract with it no matter the cost. They are on the hook for delivering reliable services and when things go TITSUP they want a throat to choke and they want it now. Evolving the software itself slowly isn't merely acceptable, it's preferable. Whether there's any community around it is largely irrelevant; they're paying for support so they don't need a disqus forum somewhere, and they don't care whether kids at home can play along.

The kids at home don't care about support because they couldn't afford it anyway, and it makes little sense to buy support for something that's not being used to generate revenue. A community-based alternative is nice when things go wrong, but there are a hundred other free, open source OSs out there so if CentOS were really broken (which of course meant that RHEL was broken too and those enterprise IT shops were busy choking RH throats), they could always use something else.

Everyone else really just wants it to cost nothing. If they can have something identical to RHEL that costs nothing, that's best -- they're freeloading on the enterprise IT shops when it comes to getting things fixed. But they don't have time to contribute anything anyway; these are mom and pop shops with one or two "IT guys" who are usually too busy to do anything but extinguish the biggest fire they happen to know about. They haven't got any budget so they aren't going to buy support from anyone, either.

This is the classic "we're losing out on all this business!" story we've heard time and again from pretty much everyone selling goods with a marginal cost of zero who find people freeloading. In reality, the mere fact that a lot of people were freeloading (in terms of support, where a support ticket led to a software fix) doesn't mean there was much or even any lost business there. Those people weren't going to pay for your support contract anyway, and by ending their freeloading all RH/IBM have done is convince them to use someone else's (also free) product instead.

Is that good for the business? Bad? Mostly it's probably neither. Some will make the case that it's bad because it shrinks the body of professionals familiar with the RH tools and ecosystem, but the reality is that most IT pros adapt to whatever the shop that's hired them is using. I suppose it's good in that they don't need to bother building CentOS any more, but by creating Stream instead (which no one wants) they're actually investing more without getting anything from it, so that doesn't seem like much of an argument either. The revenue needle isn't going to move, because everyone who wanted RHEL support and was willing/able to pay for it was already doing so.

In the limit, new rebuilds will exist again and life will go on for everyone pretty much as it has, because most people care about neither support nor community: they're just using whatever seems most convenient to do their jobs, as long as it doesn't cost anything. It's a pile of packages of free software, not a church.

"Enterprise IT shops want software that their bosses tell them to buy, and they want a golden support contract with it no matter the cost. They are on the hook for delivering reliable services and when things go TITSUP they want a throat to choke and they want it now."

No. That's old school thinking and obsolete now when "golden support contract" from *anyone* doesn't provide actual support whatsoever. Those exist only to make money and only MBAs buy them, not IT people.

You get actual support from Microsoft (or RHEL) if you are DOJ or DOD. Otherwise: Good luck.

Even for enterprise level of users: If internal support can't solve it, it's not solved.

Then you just want reliable services from lowest bidder and CentOS has been by far the best on that since 1990s as tens of thousands of enterprises use RHEL and CentOS is 1:1 clone.

It's confirmed to be a stable platform which really doesn't *need* a support contract. Which obviously is something RH is going to change by forcing the Streams, i.e. Fedora, i.e. alpha level packets to business users too.

Unless they pay RHEL-tax. One of my client calculated that whole development team can do a month work for migrating to other distro by the yearly price of RHEL support contract.

Obviously, it won't take a month of work to migrate from CentOS. RH/IBM bean counters haven't realized that, at all.

They will.

" The revenue needle isn't going to move, because everyone who wanted RHEL support and was willing/able to pay for it was already doing so."

Yes. I think this is a major point RH/IBM morons aren't getting at all. Not one CentOS 7 user is *migrating* to RHEL 8, it costs too much. As money and as work.

Streams is by definition unstable stuff, like Fedora: No-one wants that even near to production.

What's left? Migrate to Debian, perhaps.

..."golden support contract" from *anyone* doesn't provide actual support whatsoever.

Of course it doesn't, but the big IT shops with big budgets still pay for them. We all laugh at IBM's ever-shrinking revenue, but people are still giving them $75 billion a year and most of that is for support contracts. Almost all of the RH reporting segment is support contracts and that's been growing. So it's not what reality is but what the customers think it is that matters. They have money and they want to spend it on this, so they do. The support is nothing (how could it be? IBM fire their best engineers and hire mostly the dregs) but the throat to choke is worth a lot to an IT director. That they could get better support for 1/10 the price by hiring a few generalist engineers is not within their ability to consider, much less accept. Obsolete thinking? Sure is!

The reality that I think most rank and file operations staff have come to understand is that if you are not a government behemoth or one of "the hyperscalers", you don't get any kind of customer service at all from anyone for anything ever, whether you pay for it or not. It's no more true in IT than anywhere else; that's pretty much just life in the 21st century: no one is willing to work for anything if it's not going to result in a tremendous immediate windfall. Everyone else exists only to be locked into some kind of useless subscription and sucked dry. The idea of patiently caring for thousands of customers who give you a profit and expect value in return just sounds too much like work.

" If they can have something identical to RHEL that costs nothing, that's best -- they're freeloading on the enterprise IT shops when it comes to getting things fixed"

You seem to forget that said "freeloaders" provide almost all bug reports and most of the bug fixes as community service to *CentOS*. RHEL gets them as a byproduct.

For free and as such, it's the RH which is actual freeloader and community does most of the work here. Now RH is ditching that work and it will bite them in the bottom later.