Hello All- After reading and digesting a ton of community chatter about the recent CentOS announcement I've come to the conclusion that there's a lot of good about this, but there are also a lot of concerns that are being ignored. And nobody so far has stared directly into the eyes of the elephant in the room. So here goes. The Good: From a technical perspective- both in the sense of "getting newer software" and "technical community being more involved in bugfixes, etc"- having *a version* of CentOS called "AppStream" is fantastic. The various RedHat and CentOS folks who have been extolling these virtues in blog posts and twitter feeds are right-on. But from responses I've seen, it appears to me that they think that these virtues are enough to completely gloss over the complete and utter clusterfrackas they've caused. The Bad: No point releases. There is POSITIVELY NO* REASON that they can't have AppSream and still do point releases. Brand new stuff would go into AppStream, at some point they do a point release of RHEL, then follow the normal CentOS procedure to spin a CentOS build of that point release. This is already a tried and true process. It will cost RedHat all of what, low five digits (if that) in developer salary to do this. Heck I'm sure some volunteers would step up to use the existing infrastructure if RedHat didn't want to spend any paid developer time on this. The Ugly: I denoted "NO* REASON" above because there actually *are* reasons that we are not privy to. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPKr/status/1336744681716244480 Since RedHat is not being transparent with this, we are forced to speculate and remain bewildered at why they would make a decision that is going to cost them so much in the long run. The most common (and most likely) theory is that some MBA somewhere in middle management saw all of this CentOS being used in production environments (and otherwise downloaded for free), and had the idea that if CentOS had its head cut off people would just buy RHEL subscriptions. That may happen in a few cases, but for the most part, that is NOT what is going to happen. By handling the CentOS situation in this way, RedHat has branded itself as a company that acts in bad faith. If a company acts in bad faith towards a community where non-monetary value is exchanged, WHY would you trust that company to hold up its obligations for contracts that are actually paid? People are going to do whatever they can to get away from RedHat. Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE will all benefit from this. Even in cases where non-profits and other similar clients "contact RedHat about options because Stream won't meet their needs"- why would such entities have ANY reason to trust anything that RedHat says to them? There have been hundreds of other messages that describe exactly what RedHat loses in this deal so I won't go into that here. But branding oneself as a "bad faith actor" is usually a terrible way to try to pick up a little bit of subscription revenue. In the end it's going to be a losing scenario. This is an absolutely UNMITIGATED DISASTER from a marketing and community goodwill standpoint. It can, however, be mitigated if RedHat backtracks, admits their mistake, and affirmatively commits to support future CentOS point releases. I'll be interested to see how this turns out. --JK