It's funny, when a corporation buy's a community and then decides something without asking the community and even cut the support-time, who could imagine that people get angry?? Has RedHat the same marketing firm as Oracle?
Now CentOS's practical goal - repackaging RHEL gratis - isn't really compatible with what a true community project like Debian is about, in my view. There's no real way for the project to steer away from whatever RHEL chooses to deliver, in neither a positive or negative direction. In that sense, "CentOS Streams", as a new upstream-of-sorts for RHEL, is much more "C"-enabling that what CentOS has been before - because a community (if one will emerge, or maybe it already has) can actually take action to change their own fate, and not totally depend on whatever their Enterprise Linux Overlords decide to make happen.
A pity we're not really looking for this kind of thing where I work now, and most current users of CentOS probably weren't really in it for the "C", but more for the "entOS" part. They were looking for being able to rapidly roll out RHEL clone installations, without having to pay or care about any stupid and impeding commercial licensing restrictions at all. Well, the free lunch at that particular place is over, it seems.
That said, I'm curious to see what will take CentOS's place in that regard.
The community response is in no way FUD. They took a project, killed it, and expect you to like whatever rolling alpha they pretend is it's replacement.
That's as far from "innovation" as you can get - and that was the point. We didn't want the bleeding edge. We wanted the spine of the blade upon which to build our bleeding edge software.
Let's say, Nginx. On Debian, you might be running "buster", their stable release, and running nginx 1.18-1.19. On CentOS, you'd be running on nginx 1.14. This means that you're missing features, but the versions you're running are about as bulletproof as software gets, and (were) still receiving security updates.
Newer versions are available, but usually from the developers directly; the official repos always held much older, stable versions.
When they offered "Decades of Support", they meant it (well, they used to mean it).
Just trust us, we backported that...
Here is the mailing list entry for when they were acqi-hired : https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu...
Instead of seeing CentOS fold, Red Hat decided to hire the core members and support the project. They set up a governance structure for the project, which pretty much guaranteed a RH majority in all votes. AFAICT, there was no requirement for public voting, board seat terms, elections, or public input.
CentOS never really had the strong (public) governance model of something like Debian. RedHat bought the project the old fashioned way — they hired the people who worked on it and stacked the board.