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AFAICT, that's why they "bought" CentOS: to embrace-extend-extinguish it. There was no mistake about it.

In hindsight, that does look plausible. However I'm not sure that the timeframe supports it. The company acquired the CentOS organisation in 2014, and it didn't kill off the free Linux distro until 2020. That's a pretty big gap.

And the decision to withdraw CentOS 8 was taken quite suddenly, part way through the advertised 10 year lifetime of EL8. And the free RHEL development licence offer wasn't ready to go the day of the announcement - there was a delay of some months.

I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.

So...IBM, huh?

The decisions seem rushed, not borne out of consensus, and not well thought out

I think the existence of Scientific Linux was one of the things keeping RH honest until then.

In 2019 the Scientific Linux developers announced they would stop development and collaborate on CentOS instead.

At that point Red Hat had captured the RHEL-clone world, leaving them in a position to destroy it.

There's still Springdale / PUIAS, out there just trying to do their thing... not sure what route they'll take.

I remember trying out PUIAS for a short time back when CentOS was having a lot of community issues.

This exactly

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