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Comment by infamia | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we can simply forget that RH are the ones who made CentOS an internal project, promised to grow and support it, kill it off, and then call folks who are upset about the bait and switch "freeloaders". That seems rather dishonest, considering it is the polar opposite of what they initially promised to do.

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In before someone from Red Hat comments that nobody ever used the term 'freeloader' in public communications...

Thanks for doing it preemptively! ;)

You writing "in before" doesn't make it less true. We don't call free-clone users "freeloaders".

At the very best, "freeloader" is a term used by someone internally, but I've never ever heard it used in over 10 years in the company.

Full disclosure: Red Hat employee, not writing in the name of the company, views my own and all that. I'm also pretty pissed about CentOS dying, and like many Red Hatters, have voiced my concerns internally. I also happen to think that a lot of the online criticism is unfair, incorrect, and sometimes done in bad faith. So I'm trying to be accurate. As far as I know, nobody in Red Hat calls or even thinks of CentOS/Rocky/Alma/Oracle/... clones as "freeloaders".

I just installed CentOS on my new home server and it's supported until 2027.

That sounds unlikely. Have you been taken in by the name squatting of "centos stream" sounding like centos while being a totally different thing? That was basically the point of IBM choosing that name after extinguishing centos.

Example of "no more centos" evidence: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/centos-linux-eol

Centos was a de-branded redhat built by a community effort that behaved the same as RHEL, so you could use it to develop&test software for deployment on RHEL.

Centos stream is an unstable upstream that RHEL is partially derived from, run by IBM. It could have been "fedora", but that wouldn't have the same obfuscation properties. Presumably IBM don't really need two unstable upstream distributions and will drop one of them at some point.

There are a couple of new community redhat builds, none called centos.

It's not a "totally different thing". It's different, yes, but not that different.

The name "Community ENTerprise OS" is still perfectly accurate. The release model is a little different from CentOS and RHEL, but you still get LTS support comparable to every other LTS distro, you are still guaranteed no ABI changes, etc. RHEL is built from CentOS Stream, so nothing can go into CentOS Stream that wouldn't go into RHEL.

>RHEL is built from CentOS Stream, so nothing can go into CentOS Stream that wouldn't go into RHEL.

This isn't strictly true. The main problem with CentOS Stream is that embargoed security updates don't go into Stream until after they ship in RHEL. This means that if the developer responsible for the patch forgets to commit it to Stream, it can take weeks or even months until somebody at Red Hat notices and the patch goes out to Stream users. As one example, a couple months ago basic packages like httpd and php were 4 and 5 months behind RHEL, respectively.

I'll point out that automation is gradually being built to avoid that kind of scenario, however.

The problem with httpd and PHP is due to issues with modularity in CentOS Stream 8. This is fixed in 9.

Yeah, Stream is okay if you don't require bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL and just want a familiar, relatively stable, rpm-based distro. I would say its role corresponds loosely to Debian testing, whereas Fedora is more like sid.

In reality, though, I've been advising clients to treat Stream as nothing more than a stopgap solution until they can migrate to something Debian-based. We've been burned once by the untimely EOL of CentOS 8, and the continuing drama just doesn't instill confidence in the future of any free-as-in-beer distro related to Red Hat.

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