On December 8, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen announced a major change to the future and operation of CentOS Linux. CentOS Linux will cease to be supported in 2021 and will be developed as a stable release distribution, with CentOS Stream taking center stage as both a project and an upstream of the RHEL distribution. CentOS Stream, first announced in September 2019, is a rolling release distribution that exists as a middle ground between Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This development model allows the community to discuss, suggest, and contribute features and fixes to RHEL more quickly.
What is CentOS?
CentOS (short for Community Enterprise Linux Operating System) was founded in 2004. The first version of CentOS released in 2004 was called version 2 – to coincide with the current RHEL 2.1. Since then, each major version increase of RHEL has resulted in a corresponding new major version of CentOS, following the same release pattern, and largely built from the same source.
CentOS has addressed a broader market of developers, tinkerers, and others, and has made it easier for developers to build and manage developer environments that are guaranteed to be compatible with commercially supported RHEL production environments.
The current version of CentOS is CentOS 8. Those who rely on CentOS 8 to enjoy the reliability and features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, but without the licensing costs, etc., should be aware that support for the distribution will end in 2021. After the end of 2021, CentOS 8 will no longer be maintained, but CentOS 7 will continue to be supported until 2024.
Red Hat noted in its announcement that if someone is using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment and is concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet their needs, they can contact them to learn about the alternative options the company provides. In other words, if they want to continue using CentOS 8 safely after 2021 and not switch to Stream, they should choose a Red Hat subscription service
Red Hat believes that the transition to CentOS Stream is the best way to further and more closely engage the community with the development of the RHEL distribution. CentOS Stream sits as a distribution between the Fedora Project and the RHEL distribution. In the first half of 2021, the company plans to make low- or no-cost subscriptions available for various uses, including options for open source projects and communities and expanding Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription use cases to better serve the needs of Linux system administrators based on CentOS.
Red Hat's announcement has sparked a storm of reactions from administrators who base systems on this free "clone" of RHEL. Specifically, many report that the reason someone uses CentOS is that it is a rebuilt RHEL and therefore this decision automatically cancels the existence, use and participation of the wider community in the development of the distribution. Others report that the reason they have been using CentOS until now was because it was a stable distribution. However, with the change to CentOS Stream, the distribution is transformed from a stable release, into a "beta testing ground" distribution for RHEL.
