It was successful as it gave most of the benefits of RHEL without the expense.
RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1].
RedHat shut CentOS down.
New alternatives are coming along to take the role of a free distribution compatible with RHEL.
[1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
>RedHat shut CentOS down.
It should be noted that six years passed between point A and point B, during which time Red Hat did invest quite a lot of additional resources in CentOS. Red Hat did not acquire CentOS and then immediately shut it down.
CentOS Stream is also not a wholly different thing from CentOS, although it is obviously not exactly the same thing.
CentOS stream is primarily intended to onboard users onto RHEL, which is undesirable when nobody trusts Red Hat to keep their word now.
I thought that neither Red Hat nor CentOS foundation gave a lifecycle date for CentOS 8. Can you help me find that lifecycle statement?
I suppose people are trying to claim this wasn't actual CentOS policy, but it was, and when the project abruptly decided to truncate eight years of announced support, at no point did anyone involved deny this was a change.
I thought that the "10 years of support" which was customary w/ CentOS wasn't applied, but neither Red Hat nor CentOS made specific announcements that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support. People believed that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support because of what was done in the past, but that's always subject to change.
If, however, there were direct statements from Red Hat or CentOS that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support and then they changed that - that's moving the cheese for sure.
Though there are some gaps on the Wayback machine that makes it hard to find some centos8 related posts at the time it launched, but I'd be surprised if the eol wouldn't have been announced elsewhere too.