Re the CentOS _brand_: People keep saying: OK, you realized that
taking over CentOS was a mistake. Fine. Just give it back to the
community. Now, let's have an exercise. Red Hat claims that CentOS
costs it money. A lot of money. And that if CentOS Linux would
continue as-is, even without Red Hat's financing, it would still
cost it quite a lot of money. See the linked article at start of
this thread, and other stuff here, for details. But it's not
important if you accept this fact as presented or not. Just accept
that this is Red Hat's stand - that CentOS Linux will continue
costing it money, as-is. Now, suppose that Red Hat, expecting the
huge noise/backlash such an announcement would cause, would simply
quitely try to find contributions somewhere and keep the project
as-is. Would this help covering these costs? Would a thread like
current exist? Would people seriously start thinking about what
it means to have something like CentOS Linux? How much it costs?
etc.? I do not think so. 

So Red Hat decided it's best for
everyone to simply publicly kill it. To make it extremely clear
that Red Hat is not involved anymore in any RHEL rebuilds. That
from Red Hat's POV, if you want CentOS Stream, as presented, you
are most welcome to try it, that if you want RHEL, you have
several options for getting it, but that if you want a RHEL
rebuild, then CentOS isn't one, and Red Hat is not going to be
involved in one. That if anyone wants to make one, fine - but
Red Hat is not part of that. 

I think this supposition undervalues the awareness of the folks on this list, or who have been a part of this industry for a long time.

RedHat is a for-profit company, borne from a foundation of open-source. Most of the users are also for-profit companies of one type or another. One for-profit company is not going to simply "donate" to another one without some sort of return, even if it isn't a great one. But everyone in the OSS community who's been here for a while is well aware of the communal challenges around free-ridership. The relationship between RHL/RHEL and rebuilds is not the same relationship as between, say, software companies and Amazon selling it as a service. As others have said on this thread, they've worked hard to FIND WAYS to throw money at RedHat to help ensure stability, development, and resources continue, and RedHat itself has rebuffed them or been non-responsive.

Had RedHat said "Real Talk: Running CentOS is expensive and we need a better way to justify this or get support for non-revenue operations more broadly", there are people on this list who would have jumped. There are multi-billion dollar companies that prize stability but could not internally justify a switch to all-RHEL pricing, given that rebuilds operated with a level of risk that was acceptable to them (or, more likely, acceptable to their sysadmin and linux engineering teams). If you're paying 20-25 senior Linux engineers, moving from OSS to a commercial framework is a tough sell. A common-good/private-profit synergy where support contracts were paired with contributions earmarked for CentOS operations and associated PR boosts would have been a no-brainer, and that synergy was what was implied in 2014. The expectation was that if your quasi-official rebuild project was in danger of closing up, there would have been outreach. There wasn't. This came out of the blue for anyone outside the bubble.

People on
this thread keep saying two opposite, contradicting things: One,
that CentOS, as a name, is worth almost nothing - say, not much
more than the cost of keeping the domain name centos.org, and
the other, that CentOS is a huge thing, and that killing it
as-is is a huge crime. Please be honest. If you think the former,
what's the problem? Just create a new cool name, and start
collecting people to join you. If you think the latter, please
realize that this costs money - a lot - and that Red Hat decided
that it does not want to spend this money anymore. I personally
think that's fair.

The fact that CentOS Linux was *not* spun off -- not allowed a chance to solicit funding directly, years after the funding problems from before -- but was, in fact "killed" is precisely the sign that this was about RedHat punishing the rebuild userbase, and not out of any sort of desire to maintain symbiosis with the (much larger) EL-derivative community or develop further ways to improve the balance sheets of both RHEL and the CentOS sides of the house.

Of course!

As other, more senior Red Hatters already said on this thread: Game on.

We do not look for mercy. We think we are good. If you prefer doing
business with Oracle, or CloudLinux, or a (new) company behind Rocky
Linux - go ahead.

If CentOS needed a row of hardware to continue functioning (or it would die), there would have been donations. But when a new Vice-President comes on the list and throws it back at the post-2014 not meeting expectations that clearly were not indicated (and, in fact, were the polar opposite of what a downstream support distribution is intended to be), you're seeing more and more goodwill drying up. The other EL-derivatives *also* didn't operate for-profit, and closed down operations because they trusted that RH was doing the right thing. Clearly that trust, that RH would be the grownups here, was severely misplaced. EL-users have invested significant time and energy in the RH ecosystem, and we don't really *need* competing rebuild projects, which all, by definition, are trying to do nearly identical things.

The direct revenue to RHEL is not changing overnight. No one on this list *wants* to do business with Oracle, and no one wants to be enemies with RedHat. But leadership has needlessly created a hostile environment (not just a cool one, or a post-amicable-divorce one, but a hostile one) from a merciful one.

It's baffling.

-jc