Yes, I'm going to explain what happened as I've covered on IRC.

First, we didn't say anything about the EOL date because we didn't have an agreement at that time and that's the screwup.  That absolutely could have been handled better.

What happened after that was a community member, not knowing any differently edited the wiki with a date that everyone thought was the right date.  This was not an unreasonable thing for them to do.  Any other date written after that probably got it from the wiki.

I think many of you think that some implicit guarantee was made, or are applying some standard to CentOS similar to what you would a contractual agreement and those will never be the same thing.

I think Red Hat did everything we could to stress that this rebuild was community supported and best effort.  Anyone mixing "free" and "enterprise" at work need to accept any risks that come along with that, I always did when I ran CentOS in production.  Even with all of that, we gave a year's notice for 8 and let 7 continue in its natural life.  We provided a viable (but not identical) alternative, and are working to find ways too get free RHEL to people.  We're going to stand by that all of that, why?  Because at the end of the day, any comparisons to us and Oracle, or "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" are unfounded.  We made a very unpopular decision here, I get that.  But the difference is while we stand by that decision we actually do care about the impact it has had and are trying to make it right with many of you.

This is a good time to remind people of part of Chris Wright's announcement and centos-questions@redhat.com.  This is a mailing list (not a sales lead generator).  If you're using CentOS Linux today, and feel you cannot use stream.  Email us and tell us why.  The people who are creating new free and low-cost RHEL programs want to hear from you.  We don't know who you are.  And even if you are a Red Hat customer, previously you likely hid your CentOS deployments from us and so we don't know about them.  And I repeat: this isn't going to our sales team, they don't have access to this list, this is about making sure we structure our future RHEL programs correctly.

           -Mike