[CentOS-devel] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 09:06:44AM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:
> If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are
> concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage
> you to contact Red Hat about options. 

This sounds like a money grab by Red Hat and it makes the project
really look bad.  Even if Red Hat claims to be giving away "free"
licenses for people who can't afford RHEL, that license can be taken
away at a moments notice.  I'm interested to see how they plan on
providing these options, and what kind of limitations they place on
them.  I'm certain it won't be as open as it was under previous CentOS
management. 

I get it, we've benefited from a lot of work from Red Hat over the
years, and haven't paid for it.  That bill has come due.

Don't be surprised if there is an exodus of people who just want to
run production code, and aren't interested in being a beta tester. 
Because that's what Stream is, regardless of all the posts you see
saying otherwise.  It's not what Red Hat is selling their customers
for production use.

There are plenty of completely free production Linux distros out there
that people can use.  People were using CentOS because RHEL has a good
reputation for stability and so software and hardware vendors would
use it as a target.  Since CentOS was rebuilt from RHEL sources, you
could be fairly confidant that you could use those vendors.

Now that CentOS Stream is veering into the wild, will the same vendors
test their products on it?  Who knows?  Most of the vendors I've
worked with barely try to test anything on Linux, and adding another
distro to the pile is a very low priority.

To the CentOS team, good luck.  I expect this change in core
philosophy is going to be very confusing to your end users.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>