Blog.CentOS.org
News, views, and reports on CentOSThe future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release. CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Meanwhile, we understand many of you are deeply invested in CentOS Linux 7, and we’ll continue to produce that version through the remainder of the RHEL 7 life cycle.
CentOS Stream will also be the centerpiece of a major shift in collaboration among the CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This ensures SIGs are developing and testing against what becomes the next version of RHEL. This also provides SIGs a clear single goal, rather than having to build and test for two releases. It gives the CentOS contributor community a great deal of influence in the future of RHEL. And it removes confusion around what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem.
When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates like traditional CentOS Linux releases. 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.
We have an FAQ to help with your information and planning needs, as you figure out how this shift of project focus might affect you.
[See also: Red Hat's perspective on this.]
Fellow Nitwit says: This is dumb. The entire premise and the only reason anyone uses CentOS is because it's rebuilt RHEL. Congratulations on undermining that, nitwits.
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Me says:
+1
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Bert says:
+1
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Yeah says:
There goes the last reason to stay in a combined RHEL/Centos environment.
Looks like we'll be migrating the enterprise to ubuntu.
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kevin says:
For prod workloads with incredible support I would go SLES honestly. Still RPM based but like night and day when dealing with them. I wouldn't go back!
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Ciaon says: Good luck with Ubuntu forced "cloudification" in production environments!
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That's ridiculous. Ubuntu is 100% production-ready, no problem. There's also a cleaner version without cloud-init, if you'y.re referring to that - but when you've got hundreds of servers it might not be a bad idea using it anyway.
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Another Nitwit says:
+1
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BT says:
+q
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BT says:
+1
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Carsten Siemon says:
+1
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Ryan says:
This is a bad idea. I use CentOS for stability.
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James J says:
+1
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Additional Nitwit says:
+1
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Marius says:
Have you sold the project to Webpros ? :))
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antus says:
+1
My employer has a paid RHEL subscription, but we developers often use Centos in VMs and for ad-hoc tasks because of its simplicity and availability. I personally often spin up a Centos VM while working from home, and build and package our proprietary Ruby RPMs (which work differently to 8 modules - multiple versions installed at the same time), and we later deploy the same RPMs to RHEL knowing it will work the same. I also authored my recent Ansible on Centos at home to later use on RHEL.
This will create compatibility problems. I need the assurance of binary compatibility, and I personally work on installed RHEL servers, but do not have access to install or update my own.
Outside of work I am about to update a single C6 VPS to C8 for non-commercial internet hosting, but all of a sudden Ubuntu LTS, like I am running successfully on my Raspbery Pi is looking like a better (safer) option.
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Tomaz says:
Get yourself a Red Hat Developer subscription which is free for non-production work.
You will get a self-supported full RHEL version! For all your virtual machines!
So no issues with compatibility at all.
Go to https://developers.redhat.com/ to register.
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k1 says:
You can do that but a dirty secret is a lot of those CentOS systems get used in production for minor stuff. Most RedHat shops I've seen use up to 50% CentOS.
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Justin says:
+1
I thought tracking RHEL upstream is what Fedora was for? -
This was predictable from the day Red Hat acquired CentOS almost exactly seven years ago.
As usual, just think about who pays whom and for what.
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Tom says:
and then IBM buys Red Hat. you're right, how predictable. bunch of
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Keith Ramsey says:
NO, I ABSOLUTELY THINK THIS IS THE RIGHT CALL. YOU'RE FREE LINUX IS NOT OUR PROBLEM. SO, YOU LIKE TO RUN 1 INSTANCE OF RHEL AND 9 OF CENTOS. YOU'RE STEALING MONEY FROM US. GO BUY SLES OR UBUNTU THEN!
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Steal? This is GPL every thing in RHEL is based on gpl, are they stealing when they take that and charge money?
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Torsten Clauß says:
exactly
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welp says:
Shill much?
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k1 says:
* Welcomes IBM employees to the discussion *
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Arian Johnson says: Lol this guy feels like all that money he's wasted is finally justified.
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Jorge Repetto says:
The fact that Linux IS FREE is YOUR problem!!!
IBM should stick to the business of giving support to a FREE OS, and not trying to own it.
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Marius says:
https://www.change.org/p/centos-governing-board-do-not-destroy-centos-by-using-it-as-a-rhel-upstream Sign petition !!
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Torsten Clauß says:
done
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Greg Smethells says:
Done
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Leon B says:
Well that makes Debian the default choice of ubuntu chased me away with the snap stuff.
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Hakan says: Cannot say it any better.
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Anderson Zardo says:
That move from CentOS people is good...
...For Canonical and SuSE! Yep, RHEL/IBM can make more money too. -
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BN says: You think people will trust Red Hat for anything after it screwed over the community like this?
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Another Another Nitwit says:
time to abandon the ship, nipah~
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Scott Hotton says:
Exactly
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Faisal says: This is absolutely outrageous, this is not how things are done in communities. Major designs aren't just fall from "above".
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I fully agree. It seems that IBM has torpedoed CentOS and this project is now sinking. It is sad. The future CentOS Stream feels like beta release of RHEL. Not for production and stable environments. We are looking now to switch to Ubuntu LTS or Debian. Good bye CentOS.
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Creighton R Swank says:
This is incredibly disappointing to see. This way I can have a constantly unstable system. Do they think this will mean MORE RHEL sales? Cuz I think it's a good way to make your customers migrate away. Amazon Linux 2 is free.
Mate Mikulic says: I guess my argument "Use CentOS, not Ubuntu if you want most stable production" is out of the window now. Ubuntu it is then from now on.
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Martijn G says:
Well since Ubuntu is just Debian with added fluff, why not stick to Debian proper?
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sjm says:
Ubuntu LTS versions are supported for 5 years. Debian is usually supported about 3 years.
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mirabilos says: Debian has LTS and extended LTS nowadays, and is generally more stable and more reliable than *buntu.
Canonical also supports only a very small subset of packages for the very long time. (Debian ELTS is also limited, but it’s possible to sponsor those packages you actually need, so you have input. And they even sometimes take over backports, like Java 8 for jessie.)
This is more than enough time to even skip one major release.
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user2020 says:
Debian is also supported for 5 years and under Ubuntu only the "main" repo is supported, which are way less packages than supported in Debian
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Sam G says:
This is the dumbest move. If I want a stable environment that doesn't cost the earth, I look to CentOS. How much is it going to impact hobbyists and enthusiasts as well?
I disagree that there was any confusion around what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem.
Guess I need to start migrating to Ubuntu or something...
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ykla says:
So Why not try FreeBSD?
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Andrzej says:
What about GENTOO
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somebody will do another project just like centos only a matter of time
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kevin ayres says:
dude for LTS - SLES. You actually get more than you pay for.
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dmitri says: what an unprecedented betrayal of a FOSS community. looks like my decades of using RHEL/CentOS are coming to an end because they simply can’t be trusted
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Umut Erol Kaçar says:
Not cool.
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Torsten Clauß says:
exactly
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Randy says:
*cough* OpenSUSE *cough*
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Richard says:
+1
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macaBadora says:
eww, no.
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Drew Gilkey says:
+1! SUSE all the way.
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Jean-Francois says:
+1 openSUSE Leap
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Charlie F. says:
Oracle has a converter script for CentOS 7, and they will sell you OS support after you run it:
https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/
It would be nice if Oracle would update that for CentOS 8.
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OK, this sounds really stupid. If you want to pay for OS (and there are many good reasons why you could), then why pay somebody who just steals code, and not pay Red Hat itself?
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The link says that you don't have to pay for Oracle Linux . So switching to it from CentOS 8 could be a very easy option.
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Garett says:
It's Oracle. It's a trap.
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Max Grü says:
Oracle Linux is free. The only thing that costs money is support for it. I quote "Yes, we know that this is Oracle, but it's actually free. Seriously."
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Torsten Clauß says:
it's GPL,
there is no steal in OpenSource
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Phil says:
this quick n'dirty hack worked fine to convert centos 8 to oracle linux 8, ymmv:
```
repobase=http://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/baseos/latest/x86_64/getPackage
wget \
${repobase}/redhat-release-8.3-1.0.0.1.el8.x86_64.rpm \
${repobase}/oracle-release-el8-1.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm \
${repobase}/oraclelinux-release-8.3-1.0.4.el8.x86_64.rpm \
${repobase}/oraclelinux-release-el8-1.0-9.el8.x86_64.rpmrpm -e centos-linux-release --nodeps
dnf --disablerepo='*' localinstall ./*rpm
:> /etc/dnf/vars/ociregion
dnf remove centos-linux-repos
dnf --refresh distro-sync
# since I wanted to try out the unbreakable enterprise kernel:
dnf install kernel-uek
reboot
dnf remove kernel
```-
Torsten Clauß says:
great, I wil give it a try
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Vagner Fonseca says: I use Ubuntu LTS in my clients and I not have any problem. I like CentOS but after this is not a option anymore.
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Henry Zhu says:
Same here. Ubuntu is the way to go!!!
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Geeko says:
No, you still can go openSUSE Leap. It will get even closer to the the SLE stream. Next to this, Tumbleweed as tested rolling release is for those who cant wait to get the latest software.
Todd Blake says: Against my better judgement... *looks at Oracle Enterprise Linux*
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Crazy Larry says:
I suspect OEL will change to streams as well since they just repackage CentOS and toss in their own kernel. I don't think oracle has any incentive to build a distro on their own. Look at their history with MySQL or OpenSolaris.
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IBM is messing up RedHat after the take over last year. This is the most unfortunate news to the Free Open-Source community. Companies have been using CentOS as a testing bed before committing to purchase RHEL subscription licenses. We need to rethink before rolling out RedHat/CentOS 8 training in our Centre.
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Joe says: You can use Oracle Linux in exactly the same way as you did CentOS except that you have the option of buying support without resinstalling a "commercial" variant. Everything's in the public repos except a few addons like ksplice. You don't even have to go through the e-delivery to download the ISOs any more, they're all linked from yum.oracle.com
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Dennis says:
They rebuild RHEL, not CentOS. RH won't stop publishing RHEL's source codes. CentOS just stops to be the RHEL's rebuild. OL will continue to be that.
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TechSmurf says:
Not likely. Oracle Linux has extensive use by paying Oracle customers as a host OS for their database software and in general purposes for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle customers would be even less thrilled about Streams than CentOS users. I hate to admit it, but Oracle has the opportunity to take a significant chunk of the CentOS user base if they don't do anything Oracle-ish, myself included.
I'll be pretty surprised if they don't completely destroy their own windfall opportunity, though.
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os2mac says: all you are doing is shifting the licensing and support fees from IBM to Oracle. OEL is literally a rebranded RH.
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"OEL is literally a rebranded RH."
So, what's not to like? I also was under the impression that OEL was a paid offering, but apparently this is wrong - https://www.oracle.com/ar/a/ocom/docs/linux/oracle-linux-ds-1985973.pdf - "Oracle Linux is easy to download and completely free to use, distribute, and update."
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Aaron Bliss says:
That's entirely correct. There is no charge for OEL. Oracle only charges for support (if you want it).
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For now. Oracle is like Needful Things: You *will* regret it at some point down the line.
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Joe says:
"For now" == Since 2012 (when public repos were made freely available). Is that not long enough?
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J says:
Oracle only publish the last version of the packages in their repository.
If you want to install a previous package revision or not so new package it isn't possible.
If you pay support to Oracle you obtain access to the full repository.
This is a restriction that I found. May be there are other restrictions.
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Jonathan says: I can live with that because for work purposes maintaining a local mirror of everything you install is something we do anyway as best practice. Mostly because EPEL only carries the lastest version of any RPM already.
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Joe says:
Not really true. First, if you take a look at the repo for OL8 Latest, you'll see a bunch of different versions of packages. Second, there are repos for BaseOS GA 8.1, 8.2 etc with the packages that shipped on the install media.
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Todd V says: No, all the RPM versions available are provided on the OL yum server, so they're freely accessible.
Of course, you should still run latest RPMs as much as possible for security purposes, whether you're running on your own or do buy support.
[Full disclosure: I work on the OL product.]
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Ang says:
I never thought we'd see the day Oracle is more trustworthy than RedHat/IBM. But I guess such things do happen with time...
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Bill Murmor says:
So, what's the problem?
IBM has discontinued CentOS. Oracle is producing a working replacement for CentOS.
If, at some point, Oracle attacks their product's users in the way IBM has here, then one can move to Debian, but for now, it's a working solution, as CentOS no longer is.
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k1 says:
Because it's a trust issue. RedHat has lost trust. Oracle never had it in the first place.
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k1 says:
Friends don't let friends use Oracle software.
(you'll regret it.) If you need free enterprise Ubuntu or maybe SuSE are good choices now.
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Ang says:
The issue is many already have CentOS 8 environment and converting to something like OL is much easier than switching to Ubuntu/SuSE which would require a lot of work.
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Guy Schellens says:
Remember what they did with Java...
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Todd V says:
It's just OL/Oracle Linux these days (since 2010). That's okay though, it's a common misconception.
[Full disclosure: I work on the OL product. Not doing marketing here as that would be inappropriate, just fixing a naming nitpick.]
Sam Callis says: I have been using CentOS for over 10 years and one of the things I loved about it was how stable it has been. Now, instead of being a stable release, it is changing to the beta testing ground for RHEL 8. And instead of 10 years of a support you need to update to the latest dot release. This has me, very concerned.
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Sieciowski says:
well, 10 years - have you ever contributed with anything for the CentOS community, or paid them a wage or at least donated some decent hardware for development or maybe just being parasite all the time and now are you surprised that someone has to buy it's your own lunches for a change?
- if you think you might have done it even better why not take RH sources and make your own FreeRHos whatever distro, then support, maintain and patch all the subsequent versions for free?-
Joe says:
That's ridiculous. RHEL has benefitted from the free testing and corner case usage of CentOS users and made money hand-over-fist on RHEL. Shed no tears for using CentOS for free. That is the benefit of opening the core of your product.
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Ljubomir Ljubojevic says:
You are missing a very important point. Goal of CentOS project was to rebuild RHEL, nothing else. If money was the problem, they could have asked for donations and it would be clear is there can be financial support for rebuild or not. Putting entire community in front of done deal is disheartening and no one will trust Red Hat that they are pro-community, not to mention Red Hat employees that sit in CentOS board, who can trust their integrity after this fiasco?
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LinuxAllDayAllNight says:
Sieciowski, You're in the wrong place ...
The Microsoft forum is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/.
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Torsten Clauß says:
It's the other way round.
RedHat is selling something which is made by others for free.
Read the GPL license as a start
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Test User says: terrible move by IBM/RH - the community is what has driven the success of RHEL Enterprise ... and this is damaging off the upstream feed.
Merry X Mas says: generally speaking, centos 8 will
time to think about another LTS distro
Jason says: This is disappointing and frustrating. If I wanted something that tracked ahead of RHEL, I would use Fedora. I use CentOS because it tracks after RHEL, with all of the benefits thereof.
That said, how is CentOS Stream different from Fedora since they both track ahead of RHEL and therefore seem to meet the same need, and how does it provide value for us, the end users?
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Steven Pritchard says: Unlike CentOS, Fedora doesn't have to make decisions about what to ship or not ship based on Red Hat's desire to support things.
btrfs, *-devel, and samba-dc immediately come to mind.
Matt Phelps says: This is a breach of trust from the already published timeline of CentOS 8 where the EOL was May 2029. One year's notice for such a massive change is unacceptable.
Move this approach to CentOS 9
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fahrradflucht says:
This! People already started deploying CentOS 8 with the expectation of 10 years of updates. - Even a migration to RHEL 8 would imply completely reprovisioning the systems which is a big ask for systems deployed in the field.
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crx says:
Well, you get a rolling beta-testing distro for another 9 years. Exactly what RH/IBM wants to bump profits. It's no longer identical to their product, it's not stable enough to have same level of the enterprise support. Therefore many CentOS users have to become RHEL customers or move to another emerging clone (which will struggle with lack of support initially).
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JP says:
Absolutely agree.
This is unbelievable to me - and is going to be damaging to the Open Source Community at large. Published LTS dates should never be changed so dramatically with such little notice.
I'm embarrassed for those that made this decision. You turned your back on the community you currently claim to help.
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U. Schwazr says:
This. Up to today, we were at the "we're sunsetting CentOS7, new machines will be CentOS8" stage, still ironing out issues with Application Streams etc. With CentOS8's support now much shorter than CentOS7's, we will probably halt and, who knows, probably consolidate on Ubuntu LTS.
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Mark Hewitt says:
Very much this. We already have many CentOS 8 hosts in production and now we have to migrate them to CentOS 7 as it has the longest support.
This is an absolute betrayal of trust. Shameful.
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Brendan says:
Yup, if they did this with RHEL9, no problem. But cutting the EOL of an existing product by 8 years?
Burning this trust is going to hurt RH much more than they might guess.
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Nerigal says:
Definitely, cutting a live and on going production is litter ally a backstab to the community, they should have wait for RHEL 9 and announce it years before doing so,
Now this is just gonna pull people as far as possible from RH
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survivalist says: So in other words, you're making it into Fedora.
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This does raise the question of what's going to happen to Fedora. "Fedora has a valuable place as the proving ground for RHEL" doesn't sit well alongside "we're introducing CentOS streams as the proving ground for RHEL".
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Bert says:
When CentOS Stream was first talked about, they published this - https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-and-centos-stream/
Basically, Fedora => CentOS Stream => RHEL
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My trust in Oracle is not enough for me to invest time and effort in Oracle Linux. Very sad about this news...!
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The announcement means that you'll have to invest time and effort in something. CentOS is effectively being cancelled; the brand will remain, but there's no product comparable to what people thought of as CentOS before.
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Matthew Stier says:
My office switched the bulk of our RHEL to OL years ago, and find it a great product, and great support, and only needing to get support for systems we actually want support on. Oracle provided scripts to convert EL5, EL6, and EL7 systems, and was able to convert some EL4 systems I still have running. (Its a matter of going through the list of installed packages, use 'rpm -e --justdb' to remove the package from the rpmdb, and re-installing the package (without dependencies) from the OL ISO.)
Gregory Kurtzer says: I am considering creating another rebuild of RHEL and may even be able to hire some people for this effort. If you are interested in helping, please join the HPCng slack (link on the website hpcng.org).
Greg
(original founder of CentOS)
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A says:
Not a programmer, but I'd certainly use it. I hope you get it off the ground.
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This sounds like a great idea and getting control away from corporate entities like IBM would be helpful. Have you considered reviving the Scientific Linux project?
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Bond Masuda says:
Feel free to contact me. I'm a long time RH user (since pre-RHEL when it was RHL) in both server and desktop environments. I've built and maintained some RPMs for some private projects that used CentOS as foundation. I can contribute compute and storage resources. I can program in a few different languages.
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Rex says:
Dear Greg,
Thank you for considering starting another RHEL rebuild. If and when you do, please consider making your new website a Brave Verified Content Creator. I earn a little bit of money every month using the Brave browser, and I end up donating it to Wikipedia every month because there are so few Brave Verified websites. The verification process is free, and takes about 15 to 30 minutes. I believe that the Brave browser now has more than 8 million users.-
dovla091 says: Wikipedia. The so called organization that get tons of money from tech oligarchs and yet the whine about we need money and support? (If you don't believe me just check their biggest donors) also they keen to be insanely biased and allow to write on their web whoever pays the most... Seriously, find other organisation to donate your money
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dan says:
Please keep us updated. I can't donate much, but I'm sure many would love to donate to this cause.
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Torsten Clauß says:
sounds great, thanks
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Chad Gregory says:
Not sure what I could do but I will keep an eye out things I could help with. This change to CentOS really pisses me off as I have stood up 2 CentOS servers for my works production environment in the last year.
This announcement is very difficult to distinguish from just saying: "CentOS is being abolished. In future, you can beta-test RHEL, and we'll be using the 'CentOS' branding to describe that experience."
If there's a difference between what I've written and what the post above actually says, I'd be very happy to understand it.
Leandro Siqueira says: Sad news
Jakob Wildrain says: Why make CentOS Stream the primary innovation hub for the RHEL ecosystem when you already have Fedora for that. CentOS has always been a fully open sourced rebuild of the stable enterprise-ready RHEL and this is what drives such high demand for it. If it's not as production ready as RHEL then what's the reason for using it going forward? People will just switch to Debian.
DellDeveloper says: Absolute terrible decision, abandoning what made CentOS a good alternative to RHEL.
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Vasile M says: LOL... CentOS is RH from 2014 to date. What you expected? As long as CentOS is so good and stable, that cuts some of RHEL sales... RH and now IBM just think of profit. It was expected, search the net for comments back in 2014.
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Ang says:
IT's not like we weren't expecting it, but at the very least we thought they had the decency of maintaining their commitments.
So if CentOS 9 didn't exist, okay fine. We even thought CentOS 8 might not exist but it was promised and it had a promised commitment date.
What no one expected was for IBM/RH not to at least honor their commitment to LTS. That isn't professional at all. Who wants to deal with a company who can pull out their commitments whenever they feel like it?
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Ryan says: Why? What's the point of a stable enterprise distro when you are going to make it a rolling release? Thank you for ruining CentOS. You're awesome!
Michal says: Thanks for your hard work over the years.
Viacheslav Kaloshin says: For what reasons you re-invent fedora?
Kent Brodie says: My entire infrastructure has to change now. GOOD LORD.
*HALTS MIGRATION OF EVERYTHING FROM C7 to C8*
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Ruben Herold says:
Here the same. And no Rhel is not an option.
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James J says:
Same here. product was code complete in November and we were letting customers beta our centos8 version.
I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do now. It would take me 6-8 months full time to move to something else, and they sure as heck arent going to pay for RHEL licenses.
The fact that I am even considering OEL is making me nauseous.
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GTOger says: Yup. This exactly. Now we get to hit the brakes and scramble for a bit.
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Dan says:
Yeah, I just saw this and we're halting as well.
Will C says: After using a rolling release distro for years on my personal systems, I am very happy hear CentOS is going full rolling release. I will have to say organizationally, some of the old school people I work with (mostly in management) are having a hard time how to handle our image build and release cycles. I would appreciate a blog post in the future for what to expect for image release cycles (datacenter and cloud).
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Some One says: This isn't just rolling, this is basically rolling beta. Not thrilled.
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Ang says:
Keyword "personal distro". If a doctor was using a computer to do surgery on you, would you be okay with a rolling release on that machine?
CentOS/RHEL is for enterprise usage and requires higher reliability. If you want consumer grade, that is what Fedora is for.
But you are confused about something, there is no "rolling release". You still have up upgrade from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9! All that is changing is now you'll be getting less stable code.
Mike Torino says: I also want good shit for free and am mad that the party is over.
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Ryan says:
Yes, I too love when IBM/Red Hat makes a community distro into just another beta testing distro that will barely work on servers. We all should buy RHEL and shut up because the community ain't shit.
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Mitch H says:
Yes, lets release a roadmap for Centos 8 support, get a ton of the community to begin migrating over to it, only to have the rug pulled from under them. Beautiful move.
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Ribbles says:
This here is the real issue.
While I vehemently disagree with the direction CentOS is taking here, they are within their rights to do so. It's free stuff, who are we to demand things?
However, bringing out a new distribution (CentOS 8), marketed with support for as long as RHEL (2029?), then mid-release changing that to end in 2022 is an absolute shambles.
We have already started deploying CentOS 8 in the field expecting it to be supported for many years to come, now we're going to have to put a halt on that and figure out what we're doing next (and no, paying for a RHEL license is not an option).
Genuine thanks for the all the work over the years, Team CentOS, but this move is awful. It should have happened with CentOS 9.
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Cock-knocker says:
>Who are we to demand things?
The community. It's FOSS not a corporation. You have every right to shit on them for bad decisions and to have a hand in its governance.
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ldillon says:
Let's not forget that Red Hat is getting a ton of "good shit for free" also.
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dovla091 says:
Like kernel for the start...
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mgun says:
You do know that Red Hat re-invests half of it's revenue into open source projects, such as a the kernel. There are few free rides when it comes to Red Hat and open source - before they contribute and help the projects.
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Internet User says: This is a pretty clear indication that you people are completely out of touch with your users.
Joel B. D. says: Bad idea. The whole point of using CentOS is it's an exact binary-compatiple rebuild of RHEL. With this decision RH is killing CentOS and inviting to create a new *fork* or use another distribution. Do you realize how much market share you will be losing and how much chaos you will be creating with this?
"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". So this is the way RH is telling us they don't want anyone to use CentOS anymore and switch to RHEL?
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That's exactly what they're saying. We all knew from the moment IBM bought Redhat that we were on borrowed time. IBM will do everything they can to push people to RHEL even if that includes destroying a great community project like CentOS.
MC says: "it removes confusion around what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem"
My level of confusion regarding CentOS just went from quite low to fairly high. As a long-timer, this seems like a sad development.
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KM says: Yeah, excatly. CentOS was never confusing to anyone in the Linux ecosystem, even new users understood it. Now though, what the heck.
Andy Cater says: Not unprecedented - look at Red Hat 9 and the start of Red Hat Enterprise. Fedora was spun off at that point as a way to retain developers interested in FLOSS.
See also discussion on LWN (lwn.net)
KevinR says: Agree completely. To go back on that LTS date is a terrible idea. Ton's of shop's have spent significant time uplifting their 6/7 environments to 8 and then this gets dropped. Unbelievable...
Rado says: Debian / Ubuntu it is then !
Ryan says: Well now I regret deploying CentOS 8 last week. Can't wait to re-do all that in a year...
Anyway thanks for all the great work in the past. Sad to see CentOS die like this though. Was a great ride while it lasted.
Vinícius Ferrão says: What's the point of Fedora now? Why do this? That's really bad for everyone that invested time on Enterprise Linux (EL) derivatives.
If RHEL would be like RHL was in the late 90's and early 00's I'm fine with it, but I don't see RHEL being free without support anymore.
This is just killing CentOS. CentOS have the true winner in clones war, Scientific Linux, PUIAS, and others that I don't even remember the names converged to CentOS.
So our hope now it that the CERN folks continue the game with Fermilab and reconsider Scientific Linux 8 to be back.
What a disappointment with this move from Red Hat.
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It's not something that's *going to* kill CentOS. It is precisely that. That's what they've announced. The fact that they're re-using the CentOS brand for something different doesn't really mean anything.
Bertalan Imre says: What? Why? Who came up with this idea? Fire him/her. You just shot yourself in the leg.
I assume 2021s mor relevans search will be: How to migrate from CentOS to Ubuntu...
OS says: First CoreOS, now CentOS.
It's about time to switch to one of the *BSDs.
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k1 says:
FreeBSD makes a dammed good server if you can swing it past IT.
Unlike RedHat they do backports and are always 100% API backwards compatible so you actually *can* upgrade it without breaking your applications.
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mgun says:
That is false. It seems you do not understand what RHEL is. At day 0 of a RHEL major release, software is selected and then, for the next 10-12 years, Red Hat does backporting for the complete ABI. Significant work. No other Linux distro comes close.
Read more here: https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel8-abi-compatibility
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k1 says:
No, everyone knows you can't go from a major version of RHEL to the next without a re-deploy.
It almost NEVER updates cleanly without breaking your custom apps on top. Only FreeBSD (and Debian sometimes) seem to get this right.
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k1 says:
You're right that they do it on the major versions.. but not between them.
FreeBSD 4 is API compatible with 12.
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Tim Williams says: I'm really glad that I haven't upgraded to CentOS 8, I was considering it for 2021. I will be looking for a new Enterprise OS to replace CentOS 7 with now. Feels like a lucky escape.
JD says: Wow. Well, I guess that means the tens of thousands of cores of research compute I manage at a large University will be migrating to Debian. I’ve just started preparing to shift from Scientific Linux 7 to CentOS due to SL being discontinued by 2024. Glad I’ve only just started - not much work to throw away.
MSA says: Not very often does one see such a respectable brand like CentOS/RH turn its back to its user-base in such a way.
ali says: We migrate to Debian with thousands of servers.
HPC Brawn says: Only in 2020...
I'm going to contact Red Hat and ask for options, for sure. Who can I flog, and what can i flog them with?
TechieMusician says: Well thanks for a whole lot of nothing. I spent the last week setting several servers up with centOS8 expecting 10 years. Now I'm on a rolling release. Well if I'm going to be on a rolling release, I guess I'm using archlinux for everything like on my personal computer. A big thank you for not following through on our listed commitments that people have made decisions on. No faith in cent os.
This is ridiculous. Completely destroying the entire point of CentOS for the majority of us. Sign this petition please: https://sprsrv.cc/VlGNQ
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Tim Williams says:
I've signed, but the bond of trust relating to EOL dates has been broken, so I'm really not sure I would want CentOS 8 now even if RedHat back down. For me the same would now apply to purchasing RHEL if I were inclined to do so. Who is to say they won't change that as well?
Andrew Dingman says: My hot take is much different than the rest of what I'm seeing here. Fedora has always been the fast-moving active development distro, with RHEL/CentOS as the stable LTS. This mostly just gives the community at large more access to the process by which the latter is created.
It sounds like the community will have more insight into, and potentially more influence over, that process. We'll see how RHEL is maintained, and how new features that were *developed* in Fedora or other upstream projects are *integrated* into RHEL. Previously that has been mostly invisible magic unless you worked at Red Hat or a few big customers or partners.
I miss this kind of access supporting some of my current customers, to that could be nice. It might actually give me a reason to use CentOS instead of just my developer access to RHEL. For people who were not after that kind of visibility and participation, I guess it's less exciting.
If you just want a stable, RHEL-compatible OS to use as a development target, platform for non-production lab systems, and such, you can still get $0 access to genuine, branded RHEL through their developer program. Log in to developer.redhat.com, check out the terms, and you'll probably be fine. I use this to work on stuff that will eventually be deployed to production on paid RHEL all the time. CentOS never quite exactly perfectly matched the names of repositories and such anyway.
If you want to run production servers with the stability of RHEL and the price tag of $0, this is probably a bigger issue. But hey, Red Hat has always given us *more and better* access to source than the various licenses require. They don't owe us pre-built binaries. Heck, they don't owe source that exactly matches the commercial release to anyone who didn't get the commercial release. So, if they change the approach to CentOS in a way that favors people who want to participate at the expense of people who want to free ride, it's hard to hold that against them.
And you know if it gets too hard to free-ride, someone will start another under-resourced rebuild project that unpredictably fails to release any updates if certain key people are vacationing. Just like CentOS used to be before Red Hat started pouring resources into it.
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You're correct to say that RH don't owe anyone pre-built binaries. That's why CentOS began - other people put in the work to turn source into binaries and creating a community around it. They succeeded. RH then took over CentOS with the promise that they would keep it going....
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Jason says:
"Heck, they don't owe source that exactly matches the commercial release to anyone who didn't get the commercial release."
Correct me if I am wrong, but by the very nature of open source, they actually do owe us, the community, access to the binaries. We may have to compile it and removed trademarked items like logos, but the source code is "free."
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Ronny Buchmann says:
Read the terms. The developer program is not even signable for a non company. And the usage of RHEL is allowed purely for development. Have fun with the audit rights of Red Hat.
What about all the personal and non profit users of CentOS out there? If you take the terms halfway serious, this is no option at all. -
Ryan says:
Here's my hot take, I don't want to have to give Red Hat my email address and my name to download this distro. Fuck that.
ShameOnIBM says: IBM is declining, hence they need more profit from "useless" product line. So disgusting
Ruben Herold says: Looks like I need to move my machines to another distribution. If that will come true centos will be not useable any more
Farid says: Meme:
- Was I good server OS?
- Yes... You were...
Slackware User says: This is such a terrible idea I don't know where to start. The stability is going to go away immediately. Rolling releases are cute for your laptop but managing thousands of servers it becomes a nightmare. You thought your systems has package drift between minor version releases just wait until you get into the rolling releases. Years ago when RH released their intention to charge I had to pivot from RH 9 into Slackware to save my small ISP. CentOS has copied RH so much that now it has come full circle.
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Lukasz says:
Slackware -> free all the way
MLF says: An entire team worked for months on a centos8 transition at the uni I work at. I assume a small portion can be salvaged but reading this it seems most of it will simply go out the window. Does anyone know if this decision of dumping centos8 is final?
Giorgi Machitidze says: "This is a Community mantained site. Red Hat, Inc is not responsible for its content."
Well, is it?
CRM114 says: I jumped to centos back with the redhat / fedora split around 03. This is insane. If I wanted fedora, I would use fedora. Guess I need to move to a better LTS distro.
MM says: Unless the community can center on a new single proper fork of RHEL, it makes the most sense (to me) to seek refuge in Debian as it is quite close to CentOS in stability terms. Already existing functioning distribution echosystem, can probably do good with influx of resources to enhance the missing bits, such as further improving SELinux support and expanding Debian security team.
I say this without any official or unofficial involvement with the Debian project, other than being a user.
And we have just launched hundred of Centos 8 servers.
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dovla091 says:
What's wrong with Ubuntu LTS. I never had any instability issues
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MM says:
You're dependent on Canonical rather than a FOSS project explicitly not dominated by a single corporation.
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Faisal Sehbai says: Another one bites the dust due to corporate greed, which IBM exemplifies. This is why I shuddered when they bought RH. There is nothing that IBM touches that gets better, other than the bottom line of their suits!
Disgusting!
Stefan Lasiewski says: This blog casually ignores the #1 reason for running CentOS: It's a stable clone of RHEL. I can't tell if this is an intentional omission or what, but it's tone-deaf and out of touch.
Few sites use CentOS because it's a development fork of RHEL. The vast majority, I'd guess over 75%, use it because it's a solid, enterprise-quality OS with great community support.
Some detractors will argue that CentOS users have been leeching off of RHEL this entire time, but this ignores the history of CentOS. The entire mission of CentOS for a good 15 years was to be a solid clone of RHEL. There was an uneasy relationship between CentOS & RHEL for a while, but eventually, RHEL embraced CentOS as a valid sibling.
Agharta says: Dude, is it a joke?
Are we in April fool?
This is the perfect ending of this terrible 2020.
My compliments, I can throw my last 10 years of work in the toilet.
Bad.
Carsten Siemon says: Absolutely insane. To not have an exact binary compatible community rebuild means also getting much more lesser fixes and hints for improvement for RHEL. Sad news for the community, sad news for RHEL!
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mgun says:
Eh. CentOS is not exact binary compatible with RHEL. AFAIK, CentOS Stream is closer to RHEL than CentOS Linux is.
William Smith says: This is a big mistake. RedHat did this with RedHat Linux 9 the market leading Linux and created Fedora, now an also-ran to Ubuntu. I spent a lot of time during Covid to convert from earlier versions to 8, and now will have to review that work with my customer.
Daniele Brunengo says: I just finished building a CentOS 8 web server, worked out all the nooks and crannies and was very satisfied with the result. Now I have to do everything from scratch? The reason why I chose this release was that every website and its brother were giving a 2029 EOL. Changing that is the worst betrayal of trust possible for the CentOS community. It's unbelievable.
Eskander B. says: "And it removes confusion around what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem.*
Pretty sure no one's confused about CentOS till this announcement.
RIP Community Enterprise OS.. just when you think 2020 can't get weirder.
Vesto says: RIP CentOS. Congratulations RH/IBM, a nice betrayal from you to end this 2020
David Potterveld says: What a colossal blunder: a pivot from the long-standing mission of an OS providing stability, to an unstable development platform, in a manner that betrays its current users. They should remove the "C" from CentOS because it no longer has any connection to a community effort. I wonder if this is a move calculated to drive people from a free near clone of RHEL to a paid RHEL subscription? More likely to drive people entirely out of the RHEL ecosystem.
Dmitriy says: Before this absurd turning off stable Centos (and betrayal of trust of IBM/RH) RHEL/Centos community was big in corporate area.
Short sighted decision of IBM managers ..(
> "When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates like traditional CentOS Linux releases."
But if you read the FAQ, you also learn that once they start work on RHEL 9, CentOS Stream 8 ceases to exist...
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Bert says:
Not sure where it says that?
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q6
That one says CentOS Stream 8 matches RHEL 8 support dates.
I'm not a fan of this move at all, but I guess only time will tell how well CentOS Stream works or doesn't.
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Not that set of FAQs, this one:
https://centos.org/distro-faq/Q6 - "Will there be separate/parallel/simultaneous streams for 8, 9, 10, etc?"
Re-reading it, I overstated; the prior stream won't cease as soon as work starts on the next: they anticipate "an overlap of approximately 2 years between one stream and the next".
i.e. If you want to go down the Stream route, you'll be the upgrading servers running it every 2 years.
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John Gelnaw says:
To be fair, it's a rolling release-- you'll be "upgrading servers" on a regular basis.
For my personal system, this is fine.
For researcher desktops who need latest software without a major rebuild, this could be a benefit-- but when SuSE switched to a rolling release, they tended to forget things like VMWare drivers and NVidia drivers, rendering Leap useless for desktops and VM's.
I don't know if that changed-- I left SuSE as a result.
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Anderson Zardo says:
Remember, you're still in 2020!
Todd says: This makes CentOS completely irrelevant for running production workloads now so after just completing the migration of some rather large platforms to CentOS 8 from 7 this comes as an unpleasant surprise, time to start planning the move to Debian or Ubuntu.
Vasile M says: Amen! I was just starting to wonder when RH will kill CentOS... I was starting to think I was wrong back in 2014. Remember that "CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL"... LMAO, many were stupid enough falling for that. The same happened when IBM came into focus... "IBM would make RH stronger", maybe stonger in greed.
Sacro says: The money move the world... during this pandemic increace centos system and down rhel... lost money a now "hey guys destroy centOS and i will paid $$$$$"
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dovla091 says:
No they won't. People will just switch to something else such as Debian or Ubuntu...
William Smith says: If the community feels this strongly, they should let RedHat and IBM management know. Write letters and make calls (emails don't work these days). Write articles. When some high-profile organizations migrate away from RHEL/CentOS/Fedora they might wake up. Of course IBM has a long history of such miss-steps....
From a RHEL perspective I understand why they'd want it this way. CentOS was probably cutting deep into potential RedHat license sales. Though why or how RedHat would have a say in how CentOS is being run in the first place is.. troubling.
From a CentOS perspective you may as well just take the project out back and close it now. If people wanted to run beta-test tier RHEL they'd run Fedora. "LATER SECURITY FIXES AND UNTESTED 'FEATURES'?! SIGN ME UP!" -nobody
I'll probably run CentOS 7 until the end and then swap over to Debian when support starts hurting me. What a pain.
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morsik says: Sorry, but saying like it's all abount money is weird.
I've reported *RHEL* bug because I found it on CentOS! Right now, I should get paid from Red Hat for that since this is not more community, and it's only about money. And all other people too.
Red Hat may earn more or less money on RHEL, but let's be honest - people using CentOS reported stuff to Red Hat on regular basis so Enterprise Customers had better software they never asked for (in my case I found quite stupid bug in NTP). Why would they can benefit from money, and other contributors *to RHEL* can't?
This is more than unfair right now.
Personally I won't switch to Debian because it hurts me when I need to use it (too much wierdness on it), but I use it at current company. But Personally i'll stick to CentOS Stream because I have no better choice so far (I don't really trust Oracle to migrate to Oracle Linux).
Ralf says: Don't trust Red Hat. 1 year ago Red Hat's CTO Chris Wright agreed in an interview: 'Old school CentOS isn't going anywhere. Stream is available in parallel with the existing CentOS builds. In other words, "nothing changes for current users of CentOS."' https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-rolling-release-centos-stream/
I'm a current user of old school CentOS, so keep your promise, Mr CTO.
Rodrigo Barbosa says: Goodbye CentOS. Was nice knowing you. Time to look for another distribution, since you guys obviously decided to abandon the users you had for... whatever reason.
Oh, right. The corporate overlords or whatever.
This a very, very dk move.
Steve Jacobs says: There is nothing wrong with Centos-Streams, in fact it is a fine project that brings more community involvement into the RHEL release process.
The issue is that support was promised for Centos 8 through 2029, and now that will not happen. This is a breach of trust between the community and Redhat that can never be restored.
Even if they reverse this decision, will anyone trust it? I think not.
It's done. The End. Just walk away. Centos is no more, find an alternative.
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Brendan says:
Yup that's the killer for me.
Changing an EOL to 8 years earlier is an awful move for a company like RedHat. Trust = destroyed.
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Slackware User says:
The same might happen to CentOS 7
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KevinR says: Yes please stand by your word. Going back on the 2029 EOL date like this is a horrible decision. It should have been implemented at the beginning of RHEL 9 _OR_ at least given a few years minimum before switching (which would give users ample time to find an alternative and/or some group to spin up a new community EL OS based on RHEL source code).
C Henry says: IBM? Is that you?
Tamas says: That was quick:
"Old school CentOS isn't going anywhere. Stream is available in parallel with the existing CentOS builds. In other words, "nothing changes for current users of CentOS."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-rolling-release-centos-stream/
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Konstantin says:
From the same article:
'To be exact, CentOS Stream is an upstream development platform for
ecosystem developers. It will be updated several times a day. This is
not a production operating system. It's purely a developer's distro.'Read again: CentOS Stream is not a production operating system. 'Nuff said.
Trent Doyle says: We just got all of our centos6 users migrated to Centos7 and Centos 8 just to NOW read this. And I saw none of this covered in your emails.
Can's say as this has been a good call for me at all.
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Brendan says:
Same! We just finished migrating 4 large applications from CentOS7 & RHEL7 to 8, I was literally days away from ordering the servers and getting licensing in place for the production servers.
Anthony says: Too bad about the 3rd party software support for software on RHEL from companies that dont want and dont have a subscription and only advertise RHEL support because they can test on Centos. We'll see a bunch of software with multiple OS targets drop RHEL now, I think.
Jason says: This is a bad idea, If this continues I'll have to find another distro to use. I used CentOS because it tracks just behind RHEL. I feel like you're going to lose a lot of the community with this shift.
Samuel C. says: This makes my decision to go with Ansible and CentOS 8 in our enterprise simple. Nope, time to got with Puppet or Chef. IBM did what I thought they would screw up Red Hat. My company is dumping IBM software everywhere - this means we need to dump CentOS now too.
Tunk says: Feels like a stab in the back.
Lastorder_DC says: You should rename project then, because It's no longer "Community" enterprise os.
You can just use "RHEL Stream". Simple, right?
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Yes, good point. The name has become a misnomer.
What I find ironical is also the fact that Centos 7 now officially has a longer EOL than Centos 8!
Amazing-
Brendan says:
Ironic, and it puts those of us who have recently migrated many of our development serves to CentOS8 in a really bad spot. Luckily we haven't licensed RHEL8 production servers yet -- and now that's never going to happen.
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Jan-Albert van Ree says: With this announcement, I would no longer put much trust in that CentOS7 EOL date either...
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Anderson Zardo says:
I Sarted some days ago a migration process from servers runing 6 and 7 to 8, and I feel like and idiot now.
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I can't believe what IBM is actually doing. This is a direct move against all that open source means. They want to do exactly the same thing they're doing with awx (vs. ansible tower). You're going against everything that stands for open source. And on top of that you choose to stop offering support for Centos 8, all of a sudden! What a horrid move on your part. This only reliable choice that remains is probably going to be Debian/Ubuntu. What a waste...
Peter Vonway says: What IBM fails to understand is that many of us who use CentOS for personal projects also work for corporations that spend millions of dollars annually on products from companies like IBM and have great influence over what vendors are chosen.
This is a pure betrayal of the community. Expect nothing less from IBM.
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Scott says:
This is exactly it.
IBM is cashing in on its Red Hat acquisition by attempting to squeeze extra licenses from its customers.. while not taking into account the fact that Red Hat's strong adoption into the enterprise is a direct consequence of engineers using the nonproprietary version to develop things at home in their spare time.
Having an open source, non support contract version of your OS is exactly what drives adoption towards the supported version once the business decides to put something into production.
They are choosing to kill the golden goose in order to get the next few eggs faster. IBM doesn't care about anything but its large enterprise customers. Very stereotypically IBM.
Jon says: Like some, I have already invested a bit of work getting my systems ready for CentOS8, and that work is now probably going to waste.
But even more concerning for me is that CentOS has broken trust by reverting CentOS8 EOL from 2029 to 2021. I don't think it's a coincidence that this happens mere months after IBM bought Redhat; and this clearly confirms we can now no longer trust CentOS owners Redhat and IBM to stick to their word with CentOS, RHEL, or anything else...
OSLover says: So sad.
Not only breaking the support promise but so quickly (2021!)
Business wise, a lot of business software is providing CentOS packages and support. Like hosting panels, backup software, virtualization, Management. I mean A LOT of money worldwide is in dark waters now with this announcement. It took years for CentOS to appear in their supported and tested distros. It will disappear now much faster.
Community wise, this is plain bad news for Open Source and all Open Source communities. This is sad. I wonder, are open source developers nowadays happy to spend so many hours for something that will in the end benefit IBM "subscribers" only in the end? I don't think they are.
What a sad way to end 2020.
technick says: I don't want to give up on CentOS but this is a strong life changing decision. My background is linux engineering with over 15+ years of hardcore experience. CentOS has always been my go to when an organization didn't have the appetite for RHEL and the $75 a year license fee per instance. I fought off Ubuntu take overs at 2 of the last 3 organizations I've been with successfully. I can't, won't fight off any more and start advocating for Ubuntu or pure Debian moving forward.
RIP CentOS.
Red Hat killed a great project. I wonder if Anisble will be next?
Brendan says: Wow!
This is a nuts move! Once upon a time RedHat was a trusted name -- but after this, who could possibly recommend RHEL for a long term stable platform?
I am in the process of deploying CentOS8 development servers, and RHEL8 prduction servers for multiple customers... That is now not feasible as licensing dev servers & VM's is not going to happen in this company.
Even I could convince other folks to stick with RHEL, why would I after being backstabbed like this?
And as others have mentioned, many of use CentOS for our personal projects which gives us the experience to use RHEL in our work. Given what is happening with RedHat now, what sysadmin in their right mind would pick RHEL?
I would guess that RHEL8 won't even make it to it's so- called EOL after this.
Adam says: Absolutely disgusting. You vile, terrible people.
Goodbye to you and thanks for shanking your user base.
Ben says: I hate IBM more now.
Goodbye.
We expected this and as such are ripping RHEL and CentOS out of all 15,000 boxes.
Nice way to shoot yourself in the foot.
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Concerned says:
Have you decided on what the replacement OS would be? Mind sharing what your thoughts are?
Ben says: Looks like they're moderating comments out of existence, too.
Dan says: What a horrid mistake. Incredibly stupid. Now I have to run that Ubuntu garbage.
ConcernedAdmin says: Hoping that stabbing Open Source community in the back, will make it switch to commercial licenses is absolutely preposterous. This shows how disconnected they're from reality and consumed by greed and it will simply backfire on them, when we switch to Debian or any other LTS alternative. I can't think moving everything I so caressed and loved to a mess like Ubuntu.
Gosen says: How about trying Mageia? ^_^
sepehr says: news and event in 2020 it's more like war
John says: Assinine. This is completely ridiculous. I have migrated several servers from CentOS 7 to 8 recently with more to go. We also have a RHEL subscription for outward facing servers, CentOS internal. This type of change should absolutely have been announced for CentOS 9. This is garbage saying 1 year from now when it was supposed to be till 2029. A complete betrayal. One year to move everything??? Stupid.
Now I'm going to be looking at a couple of other options but it won't be RHEL after this type of move. This has destroyed my trust in RHEL as I'm sure IBM pushed for this. You will be losing my RHEL money once I chose and migrate. I get companies exist to make money and that's fine. This though is purely a naked money grab that betrays an established timeline and is about to force massive work on lots of people in a tiny timeframe saying "f you customers.". You will no longer get my money for doing that to me
Concerned Fren says: In hind sight it’s clear to see that the only reason RHEL took over CentOS was to kill the competition.
This is also highly frustrating as I just completed new CentOS8 and RHEL8 builds for Non-production and Production Servers and had already begun deployments. Now I’m left in situation of finding a new Linux distribution for our enterprise while I sweat out the last few years of RHEL7/CentOS7. Ubuntu is probably a no go there enterprise tooling is somewhat lacking, and I am of the opinion that they will likely be gobbled up buy Microsoft in the next few years.
Unfortunately, the short-sighted RH/IBMer that made this decision failed to realize that a lot of Admins that used Centos at home and in the enterprise also advocated and drove sales towards RedHat as well. Now with this announcement I’m afraid the damage is done and even if you were to take back your announcement, trust has been broken and the blowback will ultimately mean the death of CentOS and reduced sales of RHEL. There is however an opportunity for another Corporations such as SUSE which is own buy Microfocus to capitalize on this epic blunder simply by announcing an LTS version of OpenSues Leap. This would in turn move people/corporations to the Suse platform which in turn would drive sale for SLES.
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liam nal says:
OpenSUSE Leap releases are supported for 36 months. OpenSUSE Leap and their LTS (SLES) share the same base.
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Simon Flood says:
SUSE is now an independent company - Micro Focus sold it in March 2019.
Bruh says: In the words of Valve developers "This is utterly fucking retarded"
Concerned Fren says: In hind sight it’s clear to see that the only reason RHEL took over CentOS was to kill the competition.
This is also highly frustrating as I just completed new CentOS8 and RHEL8 builds for Non-production and Production Servers and had already begun deployments. Now I’m left in situation of finding a new Linux distribution for our enterprise while I sweat out the last few years of RHEL7/CentOS7. Ubuntu is probably a no go there enterprise tooling is somewhat lacking, and I am of the opinion that they will likely be gobbled up buy Microsoft in the next few years.
Unfortunately, the short-sighted RH/IBMer that made this decision failed to realize that a lot of Admins that used Centos at home and in the enterprise also advocated and drove sales towards RedHat as well. Now with this announcement I’m afraid the damage is done and even if you were to take back your announcement, trust has been broken and the blowback will ultimately mean the death of CentOS and reduced sales of RHEL. There is however an opportunity for another Corporations such as SUSE which is own buy Microfocus to capitalize on this epic blunder simply by announcing an LTS version of OpenSues Leap. This would in turn move people/corporations to the Suse platform which in turn would drive sales for SLES.
William Ashford says: So the inevitable has come to pass, what was once a useful Distro will disappear like others have. Centos was handy for education and training purposes and production when you couldn't afford the fees for "support", now it will just be a shadow of Fedora.
Ian says: This is a bit sad. There was alway a conflict of interest associated with Redhat managing the Centos project and this is the end result of this conflict of interest. There is a genuine benefit associated with the existence of Centos for Redhat however it would appear that that benefit isn't great enough and some arse clown thought that by forcing users to migrate it will increase Redhat's revenue. The reality is that someone will repackage Redhat and make it just like Centos. The only difference is that Redhat now live in the same camp as Oracle.
RobbyC says: What is with all the FUD? Christ sakes, don't any of you people freaking out mirror repos? This is really not a big deal. Certainly not a big enough deal to jump ship and rebuild your entire infra on debian or some such.
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Ryan says:
Well, how would you feel if you used a stable enterprise distro for your server in a production environment but was then forced to have to use non production quality software because the developers decided to change the end of life date of the stable distro from the 9 years that was set to a year without asking the community. I'd be pissed because I'd have to either deal with a shittier beta version of RHEL or I'd have to switch my servers to Debian so I'd have a stable production ready server.
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Alan Hodgson says: Uh yeah, this is exactly that big a deal.
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Joe says:
Exactly this, RobbyC. Mirror your repo. Test your image. Update your repo in stage. Test your image. Rinse. Repeat. It's like, one more step.
pgp says: Oh no!
Anyway, "Switches over to Ubuntu".
sy.yk says: I am very sorry for this betrayal.
Look, we've lost the last 10 years.
Maybe we should spend another time in the ubuntu trash from now on.
HOSUK LEE says: Use Oracle Linux!
Happy to report that we've invested exactly one day in CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 migration. Thanks, IBM. Now we can turn our full attention to Debian and never look back. Here's a hot tip for the IBM geniuses that came up with this. Rebrand CentOS as New Coke, and you've got yourself a real winner.
Irked says: "don't any of you people freaking out mirror repos?"
not sure exactly what you mean by this. can you explain? i mirror the centos 8 linux repos but i'm not sure what that has to do with the change to stream. yes stream has repos setup exactly like regular centos 8 linux repos (afaik) but the contents wont be the same.
as far as whether or not it's a big deal or not... that depends on the individual. for many switching from existing centos 8 to a continuous release beta version of something between fedora and rhel is a really big deal.
TM says: Wow, Cent-StreamOS, good luck finding a positive comment in here to quote to whoever the hell paid you to do this or litigated you into a corner. Day one and we are already discussing alternatives.
wwwrt says: I haven't looked at the program because I do the same thing you do, but I believe you can develop on RHEL for free now:
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/
cody says: Everyone predicted this when redhat bought centos. And when IBM bought RedHat it cemented everyone's notion.
I agree with you.
And on the next comment!
I had always advocate for CentOS as a stable distro....
This change, makes me change my mind about FOSS and future business stability
Ganesan Rajagopal says: Thankfully we just started our migration from CentOS 7 to 8 and this surely puts a stop to that. Even if CentOS backtracks on this decision because of community backlash, the reality is the trust is lost. You've just given a huge leg for Ubuntu/Debian in the enterprise. Congratulations!
HyeokJung, Kim says: What the..? IBM should stop doing killing CentOS! That is the stupidest decision!!!
This news has upset users all over the world.
RIP CentOS :'(
Thanks for all those years.
It's a nice betrayal from IBM/RH to end this 2020.
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liam nal says:
This has nothing to do with IBM. It has everything to do with the fact that governing board of CentOS has majority of Red Hatters. Red Hat wanted this years ago WAY before IBM.
Colin Simpson says: Shocked and appauled by this.
We use RHEL exclusively at our company and have a large contract with RH. We recommend our users use Centos at home for personal learning of RHEL. I use Centos for home server use. We make heavy use of third party repos which will likely suffer/disappear now. Centos also provided a fast environment to test things we planned to deploy on RHEL with extra licensing (e.g Clustering)
Additionally, we benefitted from a large Centos community providing extensive bug analysis, blogs and how-to information, applicable to RHEL.
I will be contacting my RH account manager tomorrow to register my disgust. Not that I think it will help, some MBA likely thinks this will help the bottom line, when it won't they will have already moved to the next gig.
Bomel says: I am senior system admin in my organization which spends millisons dollar a year on RH&IBM products. From tomorrow, I will do my best to convince management to minimize our spending on RH & IBM, and start looking for alternatives to replace existing RH & IBM products under my watch.
Christian Reiss says: This is disgusting. Bah.
As a CTO I will now -today- assemble my teams and develop a plan to migrate all DataCenters back to Debian for good. I will also instantly instruct the termination of all mirroring of your software.
For the software (CentOS) I hope for a quick death that will not drag on for years.
Alexander Joseph says: This was ought to happen after IBM came on board
Justin says: C'mon guys.. How many of you are actually using centos just to avoid paying to rhel? Just switch to Arch, Debian or whatever and get over with it.
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dovla091 says:
Well one day when you become a CIO or CTO, then you'll understand what is a fuss about..
RobS says: I'm not so sure if our comments are deemed as "valuable" as the headline says; in fact, especially since Red Hat was bought by IBM, I even doubt anyone who matters in this subject is even paying attention, but here goes anyway, just to relieve some of the frustration..
Yes, as mentioned multiple times: cutting down support by 8 or so years when people started using it is a betrayal of the trust that your community had in you, and so is making CentOS (which started as Community Enterprise Operating System) essentially a beta product.
If you really pull this through (which I think you will, because: why listen to us mere mortals when you think you can make more money, which remains to be seen), you don't deserve the trust we gave you anymore.
There was NO confusion whatsoever about what CentOS is/was to the people using it. Maybe there was confusion in your corporate minds; probably because it didn't make you a dime? Therefore you didn't create less confusion: what you did is create a lot of confusion where it wasn't before.
The conclusion can only be that you didn't want to clear up any confusion, you wanted to get rid of the competition and get more RHEL revenue. The people who where governing CentOS should NEVER have joined Red Hat.
I guess we all should have known something like this was coming to us. First when CentOS joined Red Hat, and later when IBM bought Red Hat. I mean: who can trust corporations and what they're telling us?
Companies need to make a profit to survive, I get that. So far I always understood that Red Hat did just fine on its own, that's what they made me believe, doing things the way they were doing them.
But alas, this is what you get when corporations step in and greedy people want more, more, more, and even more money in their pockets, even though they already have so much of it.
I now feel kind of foolish for hoping that CentOS would remain the way it has been until now; maybe with a couple of changes, but still remaining sort of the same. I must say I certainly didn't expect this dumb move amid a running version that was presented to be supported to 2029.
We are at the brink of migrating our old data-center environment to the cloud, and in the process we were going to migrate as much as we can from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8. Instead of just progressing, we now have to decide whether we'll even keep using CentOS, because it's doubtful if we can still trust you in your motives and if CentOS will be as stable as it was before.
If we stop using CentOS and standardize on something else, it also means that remains to be seen whether I should renew RHCE in the future, because: why bother?
I expect decisions like these will also have to be made by others, so, Red Hat/IBM, you might end up not only NOT have the revenue of us buying RHEL instead of using CentOS, but also LOSE certification revenue. The future will tell..
Finally, you already have Fedora and there has never been any confusion about how Fedora related to RHEL. There really is no need for another beta product.
All of that said and without any sarcasm: please, please surprise us positively and think it over - again.
Dave-A says: My (very large, aerospace) employer is dropping RHEL for Oracle Linux, via in-place upgrade.
That seems to be more and more a good idea...
Is Scientific still out there as a RHEL clone?
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liam nal says:
Scientific Linux is only available for EL7. They decided against doing anymore builds for major releases for whatever reason. If you are interested in a potential successor, keep your eyes out RockyLinux.
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V says:
No, Scientific was discontinued in April 2019. I believe they decided to use CentOS 8.0 instead of releasing a new version of Scientific.
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dovla091 says:
well I guess they will start the project again...
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Jan-Albert van Ree says:
Oh how I hope this to be true !
We have several HPC clusters and have been using SL5, SL6 and SL7 for the last 10 years and are about to complete the migration to CentOS8 in januari.
We will complete that migration , too much already invested and leaving it at SL7 is a bigger problem , but this has definately made us rethink our strategy for the next years.
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Tex says: I have some C8 servers to migrate to Debian now. Not a big deal in itself, I know some people have to do hundreds. Ubuntu is not usable due to their slowly enforced drift towards snap and snap store from deb packages and repositories.
The big deal is that this will basically kundermine RPM based ecosystem. Developing and testing on CentOS just became worthles, focus shifted from RPM to DEB. Developing and testing on CentOS and releasing for RHEL was convenient and didn't involve any licensing mess to slow things down.
I very much understand the need for revenue and how CentOS was seen as cutting into it, but it might actually have been a thing that fed RHEL. There is a need for quality commercial support in production, RHEL is a prime choice for that. Now they just don't have a training and proving field anymore.
Fedora just became a big question mark as well.
Santiago says: Great day for this announcement! We were about to install CentOS in one of our machines. Our option is now crystal clear: would you guess it? It starts with "D" and ends with "ebian".
Steve says: IBM are seeing every CentOS install as a missed RHEL subscription. I see a release in-step version of CentOS as a boost for RedHat.
anonymous says: Why should they not be able to do this? The point of Linux is that people can do what they want? And it isn't like there aren't enough distributions? I'm not sure I see what the major problem is. I understand that it's inconvenient but you don't pay for CentOS and this is why? How can you complain about this it's free...
By the way if anyone at CentOS reads this do what you want to do ignore these other idiots.
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Ben says:
For one it was promised this wouldn't happen when CentOS was taken over by RH and subsequently by IBM and for two, what happened to the 2029 EOL date?
I'm almost positive people would prefer still to pay a small fee to continue having stepped releases of CentOS vs streaming potential garbage at their servers, but you can't also expect people who have hundreds of servers running CentOS to up and buy RHEL licenses. I'm glad you don't see this as a problem, clearly you don't run many if any servers but to call others idiots, well that just shows what an idiot you are doesn't it?
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RobS says:
These statements do not hold ground.
Not all people can do what they want, because not all people are able to; perhaps because of lack of knowledge (no, not everyone can learn this), time restraints or other reasons.
No, you can just switch to another distribution. Apparently you don't have to administer lots of servers and/or are not automatically deploying servers. The process of everything will change and doing so means a massive amount of work. If you would, then you'd know that it's just not viable for everyone to do this.
CentOS used to be a project separate from Red Hat, and it should have stayed that way. What people have been afraid of since 2014 just happened.
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anonymous says:
Probably should have been more clear. I work for a large company and am one of two people that support the Linux environment the vast majority of which is CentOS 7 and 8. I say this as someone who's work will be greatly effected by this. But you can't blame the CentOS project for that, at the end of the day the company choose use an OS that is free and run by a community. The CentOS guys aren't at fault.
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MSA says:
You're correct, IBM is at fault, not CentOS.
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Penny says: Sorry but I have to catch my flight from RPM to DEB. See you all!
Learning Linux says: This seems such a bad move that undermines the spirit of OSS and breaches the trust of tens of thousands in the intellectual community. This will have repercussions for sure.
Orsiris de Jong says: Dear IBM,
As a lot of us here, I've been in the CentOS / RHEL community for more than 10 years.
Reasons of that choice were stability, long term support and good hardware vendor support.
Like many others, I've built much of my skills upon this linux flavor for years, and have been implicated into the community for numerous bug reports, bug fixes, and howto writeups.
Using CentOS was the good alternative to RHEL on a lot of non critical systems, and for smaller companies like the one I work for.
The moral contract has always been a rock solid "Community Enterprise OS" in exchange of community support, bug reports & fixes, and growing interest from developers.
Redhat endorsed that moral contract when you brought official support to CentOS back in 2014.
Now that you decided to turn your back on the community, even if another RHEL fork comes out, there will be an exodus of the community.
Also, a lot of smaller developers won't support RHEL anymore because their target weren't big companies, making less and less products available without the need of self supporting RPM builds.
This will make RHEL less and less widely used by startups, enthousiasts and others.
CentOS Stream being the upstream of RHEL, I highly doubt system architects and developers are willing to be beta testers for RHEL.
Providing a free RHEL subscription for Open Source projets just sounds like your next step to keep a bit of the exodus from happening, but I'd bet that "free" subscription will get more and more restrictions later on, pushing to a full RHEL support contract.
As a lot of people here, I won't go the Oracle way, they already did a very good job destroying other company's legacy.
Gregory Kurtzer's fork will take time to grow, but in the meantime, people will need a clear vision of the future.
This means that we'll now have to turn to other linux flavors, like Debian, or OpenSUSE, of which at least some have hardware vendor support too, but with a lesser lifecycle.
I think you destroyed a large part of the RHEL / CentOS community with this move today.
Maybe you'll get more RHEL subscriptions in the next months yielding instant profits, but the long run growth is now far more uncertain.
I truly "press F to pay respect" to the former CentOS team, and would like to thank you guys for the excellent work among all those years.
I also wish you real success with the fork Gregory, but I doubt it will get the attention CentOS had in the past quickly enough to be the de-facto solution we would need.
Also, why bother supporting a company which takes efforts to kill it's community ?
As to you IBM, I give you another type of "F".
I'm usually not flaming in comments, but for you IBM, I'll happily make that exception.
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RobS says:
"I also wish you real success with the fork Gregory, but I doubt it will get the attention CentOS had in the past quickly enough to be the de-facto solution we would need."
I'm not entirely sure about that. I remember when MariaDB forked from MySQL almost immediately when Oracle bought it. Now MariaDB is the default DB for most Linux distro's. I'm hoping that something similar happens for "Rocky Linux", as it's apparently going to be named.
https://github.com/hpcng/rocky
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Orsiris de Jong says:
Rob, I truly hope so, but in the meantime, a lot of people will leave the ship and generally speaking will get more frightened of using a community enterprise OS.
The fear may also come from IBMs future plans for RHEL.Anyway, it can't get worse right now, and having a fork is the best that can happen now.
Hopefully the guys from SL linux will also contribute to Rocky Linux.
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Colin Simpson says:
Your comments are spot on. ISVs often only bother with RHEL because of the large Centos base. Same with third party repos. As a desktop Linux user (commercially) this is only viable with 3rd part repo,s VLC for us is an obvious item. Will even Google bother with Chrome on RHEL without Centos? MS Teams is a corporate product we need in the current circumstances, will MS bother without Centos.
D.L. Meyer says: I have to admit -- I've not seen such a short-sighted, destructive decision in a long,long time. Par for 2020, for sure.
That said...
For all the disappointment, outright anger and vitriol, and stated destruction of trust that has been so thoroughly laid out in the earlier replies here, I believe that it is still possible for IBM/RedHat/CentOS to regain a large portion of what they've just lost -- If they publicly admit a WTF moment and *quickly* recant this decision.
In our university setting, we entitle whole hypervisors to enable our RHEL VMs, but we still run mostly CentOS-based systems (7/8) for two chief reasons -- 1) same production consistency between RHEL and CentOS, and 2) Don't have to waste time screwing around with subscriptions-management-overhead, etc. (CentOS x following RHEL x by a few days is not that big a deal for most, but we still pay the RedHat piper...)
Today, that blade-in-the-back stings... But there is a limited window to gain back some of that trust. If not, I don't think I can hold off the tide pushing to transition away from RHEL/CentOS after this.
FWIW, over the years we've seen several mostly-parallel efforts pack up and close down because they didn't see the longer term value in competing with CentOS. (White Box Linux, Scientific Linux, etc.) If no recant is forthcoming on this decision, I have to wonder if there is enough groundswell to restart one or more of these other efforts.
(Hmmmn... I'm coming up on an early retirement in a couple years... perhaps that could be a great way to keep me occupied...)
ccyen says: OK
We will migrate our 600+ CentOS servers to Ubuntu LTS
good bye Centos
zhang bao cheng says: Too bad, centos is not stable anymore
Branko says: 
I just started to migrate to CentOS8 from CentOS7, now I have to think what to do next.
Don't like this idea.
R says: Thank god I did not start to migrate my sites to Centos 8, will stick to Centos 7 and will use Debian on future servers.
Not a big deal to be honest. I love CentOS but we all can live without it. Sad, but well..
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Max says:
jejeje... at the same situation...
+1
Igor Angelovski says: Great, you have just done a complete mess of what once was a perfect test&prod environment. Debian now is not an option, but one of the requirements.
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Exactly my thoughts. And I don't think there are any other Distros which offer a longer EOL, if I'm not mistaken. (rolling updates obviously don't count)
Ralf says: Some years ago IBM bought Informix. We switched to PostgreSQL, when Informix was IBMized. One year ago IBM bought Red Hat and CentOS. CentOS is now IBMized. Guess what will happen with our CentOS installations. What's wrong with IBM?
Andrey says: "Community-driven", ok... (sarcastic laughter)
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It sounds like you're suggesting that the community wasn't actually begging to saw off the branch it was sitting on!
arthurguru says: Our annual subscription bill for using well over a thousand RHEL servers is eye watering. Our distributed and diverse development base makes use of CentOS servers to both keep costs down and ensure no license breaches occur - they are free to develop new ideas without constraint. Should I now be thinking of moving to another platform to continue doing what already works very well for us?
dovla091 says: I am so glad that I left my 40 servers on C7 so I do not need to worry till y.2024, only 2 of them are on C8 which I will rectify beginning of the next year... But after that, I'm moving to Ubuntu for at least 5 years of support. I have no man power to simply accept IBM's "let's fool around" decisions.
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devnull says:
what if the similar decision is made for C7?
O.E. Demirkol says: Maybe "openEuler LTS" is going to be our new CentOS
John says: This remembers me what happened when Oracle bought Openoffice.org
So they forced people to create Libreoffice which nowadays dominate the market.
And what today about a "LibreCentos" ?
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Héctor Alexis Pérez Cifuentes says: Branch IT and start again!!!
Fuck!! the same happen with Zentyal what is happening to You? CentOS community base will have to branch the project and start again. Or rebase to debian.
Don says: Well that's annoying.
I work for a 25K+ organisation that has been a Red Hat customer from the start.
Those of us that *develop* for the RHEL installations use CentOS because we can easily spin up a new dev or test VM when we need to without having to make a business case for it. If something even looks like it costs money then there will be hoops to jump through which costs the most precious resource: time.
I guess IBM/RH are too focused on those few customers that would otherwise pay but this will place roadblocks in front of developers for paying customers too.
And for cutting out eight years from a published EOL date? That will burn a lot of goodwill.
Former says: The logical next step is to cut off CentOS 7 support from 2021, "just to focus on current stream version".
Things could not get worse, it's 2020, right?
Konstantin says: Now please remember CentOS was promised to be supported till May, 2029.
All these open-source ventures are based on trust. Now I wonder how would RH/IBM/whoever try to regain the trust, after suddenly assigning CentOS 8 extinction event to 2021.
Paul says: A very poor decision, but I've been unhappy with the direction CentOS has been heading in lately anyway.
I've used CentOS for 10 years, but it's time to bid it farewell. This is the kick up the ass I needed to start migrating all my servers to Ubuntu server.
What's frustrating is these decisions seem to be made arbitrarily, and without any consultation.
Kodiak Firesmith says: As far back as I can recall, this is a completely unprecedented betrayal of the release support roadmap for a major Linux distribution. Stunning.
Dan says: I am a system administrator for a large ISP/MSP and we will be ditching CentOS, scaling down RHEL and moving to Ubuntu and others.
The whole premise is utterly ridiculous, but completely killing 8.x support (which was supposed to last until what, 2029?) at the end of 2021 just as we've finished migrating a lot of 6/7 to 8 completely seals the deal.
CentOS Users Unite says: All of us complaining to each other and making suggestions to a blog is unlikely to accomplish our goals. I suggest we all combine our efforts and let @ArvindKrishna the CEO of IBM who claims to be an "avid learner and listener" and CEO of @RedHat @PaulJCormier know how we feel. We should all start mentioning them on Twitter and get some shareholder visibility on how this is a lose-lose for both the shareholder and the CentOS user. They could:
Put the original 2029 EOL in place for CentOS 8.
Or at least offer some kind of route for us to easily transition to RHEL at low cost, or purchase security patches on a subscription basis.
Instead they are going to force most of us to abandon CentOS and Red Hat entirely. We don't want to have to rebuild our entire infrastructure simply to go from CentOS to RedHat.
Start the social media campaign immediately, or we are destined to lose.
Annoyed RHEL Subscriber says: You've broken trust in published EOL dates not just for CentOS but for RHEL by extension. If you are willing to alter published EOLs for one product, why should anyone trust that the fallout from changing it on RHEL in the future wouldn't be considered just a cost of business if someone thought it would make more money? Published EOLs from you can no longer be relied on, and there are other distributions that haven't made such a colossal error in breaking the trust of their users.
Thank you for making my December more complicated as we are now pivoting to redesign projects which were already preparing for deployment away from using either CentOS or RHEL, really what I wanted to cap off 2020 /s.
You people at IBM/RedHat are betraying and crucifying your own users and community, right after we have started numerous CentOS 8 systems in production, after months or even years of planning, investing in know-how and testing.
This is really irritating.
If you do not recall this policy, not only you will cause huge problems to thousands of administrators out there; you will suffer their wrath.
Unless you recall this policy and provide CentOS 8 as promised until the end of its life-cycle, you are proving imposters by luring thousands to using a product which you planned to effectively abolish.
I still hope that you will not disappoint CentOS admins and users so badly and that you will continue to support CentOS 8 (and CentOS 7) in its current/expected form.
anonymous says: This move deserves a rebranding!
How about swapping the 'e' for a 'u' ?
Just a Geek says: Funny timing on this, just switched over 50 severs from Centos to Oracle. We also switch a dozen RHEL servers over the same night and cut our support fees in half! Oracle is free, including the patching and from what we tested, a better solution for us. Now Centos is dying with IBM Red Hat guys screaming how good this is for them.
Techy says: Some time ago I switched all the kit I'm responsible for over to ALT Linux and it's been a wise and stable move ever since.
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Alex says:
It's russian crap.
Francisco says: This has been clearly a way to force all the Centos Enterprises users to pay for licenses. It is clear that RedHat was losing a lot of money due to the competition with Centos and they have solved it hard. They also know very well how difficult it is for a company to migrate all its servers to another distribution. A game of the dirtiest.
Robert says: Thanks for the news I ALMOST began updating to Centos 8 and you clearly saved me the time. From this news I am testing a Debian 10 install since it appears Centos is no longer a viable option. It's been a fun several years but now that a big old corporation has hold of both RedHat and Centos neither remain a linux option for me. Good luck but I think you just put a nail in your own coffin.
IBM is about a useless company. Thanks for destroying perfectly good software.
rob says: Apparently that answer is yes. I knew IBM grabbing up red hat was gonna be a bad thing.. didn't expect it to be this bad. I haven't played with Debian in years but it's time to get back into the learning curve. At least my Centos 7 boxes will be fine till 2024.
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flan says:
That has became uncertain now. With this move, one can't trust CentOS 7 support to remain the same. They very well may terminate it along with 8.
Nicolas V says: Can we know if this is an unanimous decision from the Governance board ?
Freedom says: Forget CentOS. Let's do Rocky Linux like RHEL great again. Story like MySQL to MariaDB. OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Only community transaction from one project to better project.
Sean says: This is a sad day. I've used CentOS for years for many different projects and it's always been rock-solid stable.
I guess I'll need to move to an alternative to get this reliability from now on.
Congratulations on your own coffin nailed. I am using CentOS7 and I think the time has come to switch my system over to Debian or Ubuntu with your decision. At least I'm fine until 2024
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Zach says: For now. They might change their mind again. Who knows when commitments mean nothing.
Brian T Hone says: Step 1: Get lots of people to to use product binary compatible with RHEL
Step 2: Remove that product, force them to pay you money
Ang says: The fact that we were promised EOL of 2029 and got backstabbed to an EOL of not even end of CentOS 7 but before CentOS 7 is a slap in the face!
We just spent a ton of resource jumping from 6 to 8 thinking it we would be fine until 2029, well so much for that...
I guess I have no choice but to move away from CentOS and RHEL because we simply can't trust the LTS commitments.
Who wants to do business with a company who you can't trust?
selcuk says: Time to leave centOS/redhat.. Goodbye..welcome to Ubuntu..
Geeko says: Looks like openSUSE will get lots of new subscribers now: While Leap gets closer to SLE - currently they use the same sources for the base packages, in the future the same binaries, Tumbleweed as the tested rolling release is for everyone who cant wait to get the latest software.
Remember, openSUSE is an independent community that builds great tools beside the Distributions....
Hi all,
Remember when RedHat, around RH-7.x, wanted to charge for the distro, the community revolted so much that RedHat saw their mistake and released Fedora.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Even though RedHat/CentOS has a very large share of the Linux server market, it will suffer the same fate as Novell (had 85% of the matket), disappearing into darkness !
Mihel-André
PeteVM says: As I predicted, RHEL is destroying CentOS, and IBM is running Red Hat into the ground in the name of profit$. Why is anyone surprised? I give Red Hat 12-18 months of life, before they become another ordinary dept of IBM, producing IBM Linux. CentOS is dead. Time to either go back to Debian and its derivatives, or just pay for RHEL, or IBMEL, and suck it up.
Jeff G says: @Nicholas V
From https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux
> Given this, we’ve informed the CentOS Project Governing Board that we are shifting our investment fully from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream.
So basically CentOS 8 has been defunded. I doubt the governing board is happy either. It'll be interesting to see what Karanbir Singh does next.
Tom says: Looking at all these comment (and I agree wholeheartedly), a very fitting scene from "Good Morning Vietnam" springs to mind:
1 guy called and said it was visionary, the other 1100 said it was not. - "Hey IBM, you svck. Eat a bag of sh^t. That's pretty much to the point."
Ironic how a comedy is the most fitting one...
RootSwitch, LLC says: Welllllll then. 317 servers to move to Ubuntu LTS and I WON'T bother moving any back if you reverse the decision.
Obviously says: Finally, centos is rolling release. Every year I ask why oh why couldn't this distro be rolling release?? Well, ask and you shall receive! This distro clearly has its finger on the pulse of those who use it!
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Ang says:
It isn't going rolling release.
You still have to upgrade from CentOS stream 8 to CentOS stream 9.
The only thing that is changing is you are getting less stable release.
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Person says:
I genuinely cannot tell if you are sarcastic or stupid.
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Brendan says:
CentOS as it existed is now dead. CentOS Stream is a "development platform".
JadeK says: I am mid-migration from Rhel/Cent6 to 8. I now have to stop a major project for several hundred systems. My group will have to go back to rebuild every CentOS 8 system we've spent the last 6 months deploying.
Congrats fellas, you did it. You perfected the transition to Debian from CentOS.
Well “Those who do; decide” and that is going to happen.
- RedHat stops CentOS stable releases
- Somebody creates a fork and fills the gap.
Alan says: Some guys thought they were better than others and they were capable of handling any consequences followed by their foolish decisions. Yeah, before everyone left them.
I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad.
The dreams in which I moving 1.5K+ machines to whatever distro I yet have to find fitting for replacement to are the.. Wait. How could one with all the seriousness consider cutting down already published EOL a good idea? I literally had to convince people to move from Ubuntu and Debian installations to CentOS for sake of stability and longer support, just for become looking like a clown now, because with single move distro deprived from both of this.
thezero says: This is a monumental shoot in the foot.
For years i have used CentOS for home projects and enterprise projects. Those enterprise projects always turned into RHEL projects because of CentOS.. This is really a bad move for IBM.. Well, i knew something bad would happend when IBM purchased RedHat...
Brendan says: "Shift of project focus" == Dropping a product we promised support for through 2029.
John Cage says: Just a shame, waste of well provided good software
Mike says: Literally in the process of migrating from Debian to CentOS for production servers as this got published. Stopped, went back and redeployed with Ubuntu LTS. Thanks a lot guys
Paul R says: Happy to donate and be part of the revolution away the Corporate vampire Squid that is IBM
Zach says: This is terrible.” Let’s take the reason everyone uses our operating system and shift our focus to the opposite”. Brilliant, love you IBM. I hope a project steps up to replace the “10 year stable release enterprise OS” need. Please let me know if anyone has an alternative other than Ubuntu’s (5 year support).
Fredrik says: Ok thnx bye!
Nicholas Knight says: Red Hat's word now means nothing to me. Disagreements over future plans and technical direction are one thing, but you *lied* to us about CentOS 8's support cycle, to the detriment of *everybody*. You cost us real money relying on a promise you made, we thought, in good faith. It is now clear Red Hat no longer knows what "good faith" means, and acts only as a Trumpian vacuum of wealth.
Jack says: Hello All,
First I want to say I have been using RedHat/Centos for 23 years, probably still have some of those old CD's somewhere. RedHat/Centos in my opinion the standard, and has been a great solid platform.
I would ask first, how bad is this? Lets not get carried away, lets give some time to the "Centos Stream" team to provide more data, and philosophies!
It's very possible they will maintain the same solid, reliable and predictable OS as they have done in the past.
2nd Jumping ship is insane at least at the moment talking about all these other flavors of linux, and converting everything tomorrow... slow your roll.
There are excellent solutions out there, yes Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo ( I have a friend that swears by it), Arch and others which have their own direction to pick since they are also based on RHE.
I have a server or 2 running Debian and Ubuntu but everything else is Centos, my brain speaks Centos, these others have subtle learning curves.
My main point is, we need to see now if the direction by RH has been written in stone, and what those other distros plans are before jumping in direction.
I'm hoping Centos Stream can be the viable alternative.
Other things to consider, core internet servers like cPanel/WHM and FreePBX run very well on Centos, what direction will they take, will their research help you forge what may be a better decision then an article we read last week?
Either way, we have a window of time and need to not overreact on our frustration of what on the surface seems will be a break from RHE...
Trust me, Centos is hands down my favorite.
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Ang says:
1 year is hardly enough time. Just planning alone can take a year. And good luck explaining to management why all your plans fell through.
At the very least they could have supported CentOS 8 until 2024 like CentOs 7.
Josh T says: 90% of CentOS systems out there are probably production systems. Why ON EARTH would anybody be pleased to hear that CentOS is going to be the upstream of RHEL?
Big companies being big companies I understand. I am a capitalist at heart too, but please stop insulting the intelligence of your userbase (which is primarily engineers, FFS) by feeding us lines like "And it removes confusion around what 'CentOS' means in the Linux distribution ecosystem."
There was no confusion. We wanted to receive maximum value/benefit from the 99% FOSS components of RHEL by supporting our own systems instead of paying annual licenses on all our CPU cores. Don't talk down to us.
Just admit that you wanted to close a "loophole" that you shortsightedly viewed as giving away an enterprise-grade product for free. This will not cause a mass migration to RHEL, though, so the joke's on you guys.
I fully agree with the general feeling expressed by the preceding posts. It seems that IBM has torpedoed CentOS and this project is now sinking. It is sad. The future CentOS Stream feels like beta release of RHEL. Definitely not for production and stable environments. We are looking now to switch to Ubuntu LTS or Debian. Good bye CentOS.
Andrew Cater says: I've been a Linux sysadmin for 23 years or so now. Debian at home, Red Hat / CentOS at work. Red Hat Developer subscription for me at home - self support. Debug RHEL 7 and 8 at the same time - no, only one subscription. There's a CentOS mirror and an EPEL mirror on my desk next door - and Debian and Ubuntu. I've told my colleagues to look carefully as to how we support systems. CentOS Streams - a rolling beta to support the next RHEL point release - no security support, changing regularly. NO. I can't say I blame anybody - but good luck with whoever's keeping CentOS Streams going - you couldn't even build a stable CentOS 8.2 for a while because you hadn't sorted out dependencies and were dependent on missing packages
Tunk says: Trust is built up over months and years, and can be shattered by one wrong move.
Can we trust RH to support C7 until 2024, or will they e.g. ditch it in year's time?
Jim says: You've just lost my six figure RHEL production licenses
It seems that the fork is on. https://github.com/rocky-linux/organization/wiki/Contributing
Tux says: Terrible decision to kill most popular distro for political reason, why not use Fedora for upstream and leave CentOS alone.
Big F*CK YOU from IBM
IBM basically just showed another middle finger to open source/centos community.
Josip Deanovic says: RedHat used to be my favorite type of Linux distribution and I was using it extensively since mid 90's but unlike other people here I am not mad at RedHat.
Might be that I used up all my hate when they killed RedHat Linux distribution in favor of RHEL.
For a short time I considered to join mr. Gregory Kurtzer in his initiative to create a Centos fork from ground up but I simply don't see the point in creating another clone of RHEL as RedHat can seriously undermine the effort simply by not releasing src.rpm files in the future.
Remember that not all licenses require source to be provided to a customer and they certainly don't define in great detail the form in which source code should be made available.
In my opinion we should just let it die and focus our efforts on contributions to other functional Linux distributions already available.
On the long run it would greatly benefit us all as well as those Linux distributions and their userbase.
Currently, there are only three options one should consider:
a) convert to RHEL and purchase the required licenses
b) migrate to an alternative stable Linux distribution
c) delay the decision by moving to Centos 7 for the time being
Unfortunately, there are no other independent RHEL-like Linux distributions that are proven to be stable and up2date but there are other types of Linux distributions that were around almost as long as RedHat and one shouldn't be afraid to consider them.
As for the Ubuntu, I am unable to dismiss the RedHat->RHEL and Canonical->Ubuntu analogy. What makes you guys think that the same thing couldn't happen to Ubuntu?
Joe C says: CentOS has already lost tremendous market share to Ubuntu. This seems likely to be the final nail in the coffin. Really unfortunate, as I'd rather not use/recommend Ubuntu, but the primary reason I can convince people to use CentOS on servers, even people that use Ubuntu on their development laptop/desktop, is that it is more stable and predictable for a long period of time.
Josh Vander says: How are you going to take an OS that should have 10 years of support and, without warning,tell people sorry it's ending next year? Why would people trust you after pulling something like this? The great 2020 dumpster fire continues...