To: centos-devel@centos.org To: centos-questions@redhat.com

Hi,

Re: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/balancing-the-needs-around-the-centos-platfo...

you can spin this to the moon and back. The fact remains you just killed CentOS Linux and your users' trust by moving the EOL of CentOS Linux 8 from 2029 to 2021.

You've alienated a few hunderd thousand sysadmins that started upgrading to 8 this year and you've thrown the scientific Linux community under a bus. You do realize Scientific Linux was discontinued because CERN and FermiLab decided to standardize on CentOS 8? This trickled down to a load of labs and research institutions.

Nobody forced you to buy out CentOS or offer a gratis distribution. But everybody expected you to stick to the EOL dates you committed to. You boast about being the "Enterprise" Linux distributor. Then, don't act like a freaking start-up that announces stuff today and vanishes a year later.

The correct way to handle this would have been to kill the future CentOS 9, giving everybody the time to cope with the changes.

I've earned my RHCE in 2003 (yes that's seventeen years ago). Since then, many times, I've recommended RHEL or CentOS to the clients I do free lance work for. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to give an opinion on six CentOS 7 boxes about to be deployed into a research system to be upgraded to 8. I gave my go. Well, that didn't last long.

What do you expect me to recommend now? Buying RHEL licenses? That may or may be not have a certain cost per year and may or may be not supported until a given date? Once you grant yourself the freedom to retract whatever published information, how can I trust you? What added values do I get over any of the community supported distributions (given I can support myself)?

And no, CentOS Stream cannot "cover 95% (or so) of current user workloads". Stream was introduces as "a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL".

I'm not interested at all in a "a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL". I'm interested in a stable distribution I can trust to get updates until the given EOL date.

You've made me look elsewhere for that.

-- Chris