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This article shows you why Red Hat abandoned CentOS for the sake of CentOS Stream. The content is concise and easy to understand. It will definitely brighten your eyes. I hope you can get something through the detailed introduction of this article.

No, it's not IBM calling the shots. The decision was made by Red Hat for commercial reasons, and it has been made for a long time.

When CentOS's Linux parent company Red Hat announced that it would shift its focus from the rebuilt CentOS Linux of Red Hat Enterprise LinuxRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to CentOS Stream, and the tracking time of CentOS Stream was just before the current RHEL version, many CentOS users almost fainted.

On Hacker News, the main comment was, "imagine if you were running a business and deployed CentOS 8 based on a 10-year life commitment. Now you're all screwed, and Red Riding Hood knows it. Why on earth don't they start with CentOS 9?! let's not whitewash the problem. They betrayed us."

On Reddit/Linux, another person growled: "since CentOS 4, our open source projects have been based on the latest version of CentOS, our flagship product runs on CentOS 8, and we have bet everything on their promised May 31 life cycle of 2029."

Calling itself "the best Linux blog in the Unix universe", nixcraft, a popular tweet with more than 200000 subscribers, said: Oracle acquired Sun, and Solaris Unix, Sun servers / workstations and MySQL were transferred to / dev/null. IBM buys Red Hat: CentOS has gone > / dev/null. Attention please. If one day Oracle, IBM, MS and other big manufacturers buy your favorite software, please start the migration as soon as possible. "

Many others joined the exasperating group of CentOS users, arguing that it was IBM's fault that their favorite Linux was taken away. Others screamed that Red Hat was betraying open source itself.

Why would Red Riding Hood do this? Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat, said when launching CentOS Stream: "developers need to access the code earlier [in September 2019], improve and work more transparently with the wider partner community, and be able to influence the direction of the new RHEL release. CentOS Stream has emerged to address these needs."

In short, one reason is to open up the code of the Red Hat enterprise Linux (RHEL). Karsten Wade, a former CentOS board member, longtime Fedora Linux contributor and senior community architect at Red Hat, took it a step further in a blog post:

The development of RHEL itself is still closed behind Red Hat's firewall. This situation has been going on for nearly two decades. This has always been an important and often painful gap for the open source development ecosystem-it is still the same open gap as it was in 2003.

This is where we are today. The move to shift the focus of the project to CentOS Stream is to fill this open gap in some key areas. In essence, Red Hat fills the development and contribution gap between Fedora and RHEL by moving the location of CentOS from the downstream of RHEL to the upstream of RHEL.

Yes, it's true. Part of the reason is that Red Hat takes the final, important step between Fedora and RHEL opening. Another part of the official reason is that, as Wright said, CentOS Stream, as the next "rolling preview" of RHEL, can be used in today's containerized, cloud-native IT world, both in terms of kernel and functionality. After all, Facebook already runs millions of its servers on the Linux operating system derived from CentOS Stream.

So, Wright continued, although "CentOS Stream is not a substitute for CentOS Linux, it is a natural and inevitable next step to achieve the project's goal of further promoting enterprise Linux innovation." Yes, CentOS Stream is not a stable Linux server distribution that you can run for years, but it is what cloud-centric companies need to deploy containerized applications and cloud-native services to move to software as a service (SaaS) with rapid hardware innovation and ecosystem. . This is what we think is the advantage of CentOS Stream. It provides a platform for rapid innovation at the community level, but has a stable enough foundation to understand production dynamics. "

Yes, it is also true. But they are not the whole story. Here are the real reasons why Red Hat let go of the old-fashioned regularly released CentOS.

Red Hat didn't talk much about it at all, but Mike McGrath, vice president of engineering at Red Hat Linux, gave away the secret in an interview with Christine Hall on ITPro Today. " What I want to say is that the biggest problem for us is that CentOS itself is not that useful to Red Riding Hood. Most of the communities we build, such as Fedora, do have a lot of two-way community participation. Unfortunately, CentOS has never been like this. It has always been a user community, so that contribution model is mostly one-way. "

Let me repeat, "CentOS itself doesn't really provide Red Hat with that much use." it never did. Moreover, there are a lot of Red Hat veterans who have known this from day one, and they don't like it at all.

Do you know who is using CentOS? A short list includes Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon. In addition, dozens of companies build products around CentOS. These companies include GE, Riverbed, F5, Juniper and Fortinet. How much money does Red Hat make from these CentOS "customers"? zero!

On the CentOS blog, one disgruntled user said: "the whole premise, and the only reason anyone uses CentOS, is because it reconstructs RHEL. Congratulations on ruining that, idiot."

Yes, that's the biggest reason why CentOS wants to make way for CentOS Stream.

No one at Red Hat wants to say this publicly, but many Red Hat executives tell me that this is the case.

One said: "this has almost nothing to do with IBM." We were discussing this issue in detail before the news of the acquisition in the fall of 2018. There are two internal reasons. First of all, the engineering and sales departments could never figure out how to position CentOS in their respective product portfolios. Moreover, the idea of turning CentOS upstream began in 2014, when Jim Perrin [former Red Hat developer and CentOS board member, now Microsoft Chief Project Manager] talked about this possibility in the 2014 F ó rum Internacional de Software Livre (FISL) speech in Brazil. The result is the CentOS Special interest Group (SIG), which is the beginning of the road to CentOS Stream. "

"CentOS is poaching sales," says one former Red Hat executive. "the customer's view is,'it comes from Red Hat and is a clone of RHEL, so it works! 'but it's not. It's a second-rate copy." From his point of view, "this is 100% defense to avoid more losses caused by CentOS."

And a former Red Hat official said. If it wasn't for CentOS, Red Hat would have been a $10 billion company before Red Hat became a billion-dollar company.

And another Red Hat employee pointed out: "look at CentOS's FAQ, it's written right there--

CentOS Linux is not supported by Red Hat.

CentOS Linux is not Red Hat Linux, it is not Fedora Linux, it is not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is not RHEL. CentOS Linux does not contain Red Hat ®Linux, Fedora, or Red Hat ®Enterprise Linux.

CentOS Linux is not a clone of Red Hat ®Enterprise Linux.

CentOS Linux is built in a completely different build system (maintained by the CentOS project) in the open source provided by Red Hat, Inc for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We don't owe you anything. "

This may make some of you very angry with Red Hat. But before you lose your temper, let me ask you some questions. How much do CentOS's "customers" contribute to CentOS? I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about code, documentation, and support. All these things that the open source community should give back. The answer is: almost nothing, close to nothing.

Dick Morrell, who works for security at CentOS, wrote on Twitter: "Community [is] defined by cooperation and interaction. If @ CentOSProject is a residential development project built by a community, it will enjoy the extensions, floors and functions contributed by those who benefit and use its facilities." Morrell continued: "however, @ CentOSProject has always been a gift of kindness, and now those who complain have never come forward to expand the product with bricks, cement or glass."

Can you really blame Red Hat for doing what an enterprise should do? Make money while serving their paid community? I understand why people are angry with Red Hat. This is a problem of poor communication. It took only a year of warning to cut off support for CentOS 8, which naturally led to a lot of dissatisfaction. But if you are one of those people who are angry with Red Hat right now, you may want to reflect on yourself and think about how much you have rewarded CentOS before you become too self-righteous.

Finally, if you still can't stand Red Hat's approach to CentOS, there are other Linux alternatives. Also, there are at least two "classic" CentOS builds, CloudLinux's Project Lenix and Rocky Linux for you to consider.

The above is why Red Hat abandoned CentOS for CentOS Stream. Have you learned any knowledge or skills? If you want to learn more skills or enrich your knowledge reserve, you are welcome to follow the industry information channel.

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