Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of concern in the Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux.
Longstanding tradition – and ambiguity in Red Hat’s posted terms – led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 on which it was based. The discontinuation of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those ten years, leaving thousands of users stranded.
CentOS Stream
Red Hat's announcement of CentOS Stream in December — which it initially described as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux — confused many users about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat is clarifying the following:
To summarize: we make CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this:
- Fedora Linux is the place for important innovations, thoughts, and ideas for the new operating system.
- CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor release of RHEL.
- RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in almost every industry in the world.
Although CentOS Stream could be considered suitable for home-labbers, the lack of a well-defined lifecycle made it unsuitable for most production use and, especially, production use by shops that chose a RHEL-compatible distribution from the start.
Starting February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small production workloads – with “small” defined as 16 systems or fewer. This free access to RHEL is through the Red Hat Developer Subscription program and comes without restrictions
Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to teams, as well as individual users. Going forward, registered RHEL customers can add entire teams of developers to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified deployment and maintenance of RHEL on popular cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Source of information: arstechnica.com
