This popped up on my feed today, and it doesn't seem like good news.
It's not. I've spent the past 48 hours focusing on this heavily as my employer is heavily invested in Centos. As a project I've spent 18 months migrating a large number of Centos 6 production machines to Centos 8 based on the EOL for the latter being given as 2029, which is in line with RHEL 8's EOL (which as Centos is based off RHEL is logical) (Note: Centos 7 is unaffected, and it's EOL is unchanged at 2024)
All that work is now very much at risk.
This week, that EOL for Centos 8 was changed to December 2021, shaving 8 years off support. That's huge, especially for businesses who form the vast majority of Centos installs.
Redhat blamed the Centos community for that "miscommunication" which has upset them a lot, since Redhat failed to tell or consult even the Centos board about that. (Who turn out to have zero power, with Redhat having full veto over any Centos decision)
Instead of the Centos 8 Linux, we now get Centos 8 Stream which was supposed to run in parallel. This is significantly different in that it is now the upstream of RHEL, rather than downstream of it.
So, Centos 8 Stream becomes the Sandpit / beta version of RHEL. That means less stability and more rapidly changing packages. Updates are good, but most companies will value stability over freshness, which was always Centos' strong suit. That's no longer true.
So why?
IBM bought Redhat for a lot of money. I think they're pushing down on the top to get more profit from the company but not really caring how Redhat find that money. Redhat stress that they made this decision, not IBM. Whether that's true or not I don't know, but having spoken to several Redhat employees, there does seem to be a feeling in Redhat of "Why should we help support Centos, how does it fit in our model?" That feels true, and was something that some people pondered when Redhat bought Centos some years ago.
Some people will say "If you want RHEL, pay Redhat" - and that's fine. But it simply is not affordable for many individuals or businesses. Many people also want the product but don't need or want to pay for the support.
The Centos-devel list and Freenode IRC channel have been... lively. And sad. Mostly sad, I think. The community feels betrayed, remember that many thousands of high skilled hours go into Centos without payment. Reading the pain from some of these people is hard. Things like "I've contributed to Centos for 17 years, it's basically my life's work. I'm heartbroken". Others who've spent hundreds of hours working towards improvements that are now completely binned, without warning. Wasted. Several have already left the project and a large number of others are still processing the news. It's awful.
Centos will definitely be a lesser product because of this. And likely, so will RHEL.
So what next?
Redhat won't reverse this decision, that much is clear. Some options for anyone pondering are:
- Change to Centos 8 Stream and pray like hell it's not as unstable as it might become.
- Pay for RHEL. (Ethically I now have a problem with this)
- Move to an alternative OS
- Centos like:
- CERN linux
(proven)
- Scientific Linux (Poss abandoned)
- Oracle Linux (yuck)
(Ethically I have a problem with this)
- Rocky Linux (Emerging)
- (Non commercial users might want to explore Rhel Free)
- Alternative
- Debian Stable
- Ubuntu Server
If you're using centos, the bottom line is - don't do anything now.
There are 12 months of support for Centos 8 left, and things are very much up in the air. New distros will emerge, many will fail. Some will get the support of those now wholly disenfranchised by Redhat, and hopefully, one or two will flourish.
S
