RHEL/IBM Screw CentOS 8 users by early end of life!

CentOS project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

  We interrupt our normal blog schedule (I had planned on releasing the 3^rd and final blog in the Muju travel series, but I was informed this week of late breaking news that Red Hat, which was acquired by IBM in July of 2019 has  decided to EOL CentOS 8 at the end of 2021 and push the project to  CentOS Stream.  Read the press release by clicking HERE.  

  CentOS was originally a community driven and supported fork of RHEL and was first release in 2004.  It has been an extremely stable Enterprise version of Linux frequently used by IT departments and developers as a stable development / test platform for their RHEL production environment because it is almost 100% code compatible with the upstream version of its subscription based Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Vs. Red Hat’s own Fedora project which is more of a bleeding edge development / test platform which is not as stable as CentOS or RHEL.  Red Hat officially joined the CentOS community in 2014 greatly speeding up the process of compiling, testing, and release of CentOS 7 and CentOS 8.

  It may sound like CentOS 8 is mealy being rebranded or replaced by a new product called CentOS Stream, so why are users up on arms?  After all they have been getting a free stable product for years?! 

The issue most users are taking is multi-faceted.

The planned lifecycle of CentOS 8 (the period of time where maintenance and security updates where provided.) was supposed to be 10 years. A lot of users now feel abandoned by Red Hat and feel that they have broken a promise of commitment to userbase.

• 1. Users or companies will now have to migrate their servers over to another Linux  platform, even if they opt to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, this will require them to rebuild the server from the ground up.  The caveat here is that Oracles Open Linux allows seamless transition from CentOS/RHEL, with a paid subscription to the OEL platform.
  2. With CentOS Steam being put in the middle of the Fedora -> RHEL development pipeline members of the community feel like they will be used as guinea pigs for Red Hats paid customers. Completely negating the reason, they settled on CentOS in the first place.
  3. Those that came to Linux from OpenSolaris after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystem and promised to support the down steam community are seeing déjà vu and see it as a breach of trust. 

  The discontinuation of CentOS 8 on 31 Dec 2021 will affect Brent’s World, as it runs the web server that hosts the blog and the forums.  Most likely we will be migrating to Oracle Linux, but am open to other flavors of Linux.  The main reason I chose CentOS, was due to the majority of production web servers are RHEL based, it would be a natural progression of what I do at home carrying over into my career.

  As M*A*S*H’s Frank Burns would say, “NERTS!”, but at least I have a year to develop and carry out a migration plan.

  What are your thoughts on this surprising news from Red Hat?  Feel free to post a comment, or head on over to the Forums for more in-depth discussion! (Click HERE to go to the topic in the forum.)

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