> Maybe I just expressed myself badly, so let my try again. I predict that Rocky Linux will not be a big success, and don't think doing a free-beer RHEL clone (CentOS as most users understood it) is a worthwhile endeavor, despite a seemingly large audience. Yes, giving good stuff away for free is popular (and I do believe RHEL is a good product). Because they're largely dependent on RH, who 1) appear not very enthusiastic about the idea of people running RHEL for free even without support, 2) can largely determine how expensive running a clone project will be. That's why IMO it's better to analyze if users really need a strict RHEL clone, or if what they want from it (xLTS, better tooling, commercial software compatibility, whatever) could be better developed on top of Debian, whose incentives seem to class less. People who really really need a RHEL clone: time to pay up or go with the Stream (it probably really not-so-bad).

> Now unlike you I have zero inside knowledge or experience, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. But I am willing to make a somewhat falsifiable prediction, that Rocky and similar clone projects don't have much chance of success. Maybe I'm all wrong and Rocky can with a handful of volunteers and some clever scripts, resurrect CentOS-as-people-understood-it. Or maybe some deep-pocket 3rd party with a better brand than Oracle will step up. We'll find out a year or so.

So, let's try this. I agree that Rocky will not be a big success, but completely because I don't think there's a major market demand for a RHEL clone in 2020. New deployments will end up being a container Linux distro with deployments inside VMs or containers. (RH)EL8 is relatively new with low-ish adoption. We still had customers on EL6 six months ago when I left. Institutional customers aren't likely to move to EL8 until EL7 is nearing the end of phase 3 support, since the costs involved in reworking their applications to work (and their build/config management toolchain to work with modularity+etc. This has nothing to do with Red Hat's stance, which was (for the 7.5 years I was there, and still, from everyone I know who's still there) very overtly pro-upstream.

Users don't need a strict RHEL clone. They need a life raft until they can move to containers. It's not worth re-training administrators how to use some other package ecosystem. Rocky will fail, but for these reasons