On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 7:19 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@mattdm.org wrote:
[...] In the cases where RHEL + 0.1 (note not +1) won't work, I think it's incredibly likely that this will be covered by the expanded low- and no-cost RHEL offerings.
Part of the buried lede here is that with more RHEL accessibility, a lot of the function that CentOS served for users will not be necessary anymore. [...]
If RH plans to release a successor for CentOS 8 like RHEL 8 Free or so, this has become a communication disaster par excellence. The announcement with all the associated uncertainties and criticism was already picked up by the major press. I've no clue who is in charge of RH for the communication, but the team was quite bad in their job.
If I plan something like this I would say, listen, CentOS will be released as Stream only in the future but the deprecated CentOS versions will be replaced by X. Before we do this change we'll provide to you a script that transforms your current CentOS installation into the designated successor. I'm quite relaxed as I don't use CentOS anymore except for private stuff. But I can fully understand those who already upgraded to C8 with the assumption in mind that they can use CentOS for the next few years with the expected behaviour.
Changes are part of the IT and maybe the situation won't become as dramatic as the one or other may fear (especially if a kind of RHEL 8 Free will be released), but the communication around this change is a perfect example how you shouldn't do the communication.
Kind regards Thomas