I agree, maintaining two popular distro's is pretty distracting and a potential waste of resources. But CentOS was just RHEL with the branding removed, I'm not sure it was that much of a headache to maintain.

IMO CentOS was kind of a bait to get people into the tent, and then if they needed help once using it across all of their infra they would eventually have to migrate to RHEL w/ enterprise support.

Also what confuses me here, is that they claim CentOS Stream is going to be the cutting-edge distro for RHEL... however Fedora already serves that purpose.

The explanation I've read for the difference between Fedora and CentOS Stream is that RHEL branches from Fedora at major releases, but those are so far apart that there could be years and massive divergences between today's Fedora and the RHEL 8.x release that's about to come out. So CentOS Stream is the dynamically updating "thing that will become the next RHEL 8.x" and Fedora is "things that will go into RHEL 9 one day". Basically CentOS changes from "whatever was in the previous RHEL point release" to "whatever will be in the next RHEL point release".

Centos moving forward is "rawhide" (aka. the testing branch) for RHEL, where packages will eventually make it to stable after some testing.

This is roughly it, but it's also about making the development of RHEL itself more open. I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373050

I've been watching the way OpenSuse is matching binaries with SLES. This is something CentOS never had. The binaries were generated from the same source, but inevitably had some differences.

It would be much simpler for them to provide a version of Redhat that could be run without subscriptions and some way for it to convert to Subscriptions.

In other words, what Ubuntu does.

"Oh you want support? You want this extra server management software? Let's talk."

Right. I don't understand why there isn't RH that you can just add the EL too.

And it makes me more worried about Fedora to be honest, because _that_ is something that IBM could decide it doesn't like...

Fedora is the RHEL upstream. It's very useful to Red Hat/IBM. This is where community contributions happen.

Not really. CentOS was the “gateway drug” to get everyone hooked on the RHEL ecosystem, which they could then convert to paying customers. It also allowed many vendors free and fully compatible access to make their products for the RHEL platform. Now that that’s gone, the converting users will dry up, and the vendor software will dry up.

By saying it was “not useful” to them, they really have an extremely limited and short-sighted definition of “useful”.

It really should not have been such a huge extra effort to keep CentOS around in its previous form. RH is already building the packages for RHEL, and CentOS could almost be a side-effect of that process.

> CentOS was the “gateway drug” to get everyone hooked on the RHEL ecosystem

There is still CentOS Stream. Which as far as I can tell is meant to have that purpose.

> Maybe not the most popular opinion but one company maintaining two stable server focused Linux distributions which mostly have the same focus seems to be quite a wast of limited resources (dev time for maintaining both).

This is kind of obvious. When RH bought CentOS, everybody was saying "They will kill it". But they didn't and said, "See? We are nice folks!" The problem is they got bought themselves and can't be nice folks anymore.

This raises the question, why acquire it to begin with?

To do exactly what they have done now.

Since CentOS is 100% based on RHEL what exactly do you mean by maintaining? It's not like it takes 100s of engineer to do that.

It also doesn’t really bring in that much money, it might even sell customers from RHEL.

If that were the reason, then surely they would just have offered a free version of RHEL whilst killing CentOS.