One of the main reasons CentOS was so great is that anybody who wanted to try a startup company's software who used CentOS (for dev) could pull it down and run it *WITH GUARANTEES* that it would run with ASSURANCE . Because small/medium companies could *RELY* on a stable, vetted OS.

The up-sell for the client was RHEL (which was trackable from CentOS), if they wanted to run an OS with support *only* to run a certain specified product as an appliance, say.

For small/medium companies CentOS was a smart way to run dev/test/release products, tested on *validated* UPSTREAM OS'.

From: CentOS-devel <centos-devel-bounces@centos.org> on behalf of Mike McGrath <mmcgrath@redhat.com>
Sent: December 16, 2020 6:51 PM
To: The CentOS developers mailing list.; Lamar Owen
Subject: Re: [CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

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.

...

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