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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

> Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable.

RedHat has been making money for decades. The Centos rug pull was just a way to make more money at the expense of their users and the larger open source community.

It is impossible to justify a rug pull. By definition, it is a hostile, one-sided, trust-destroying, and underhanded move.

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Apparently not an equivalent amount of money to the value they feel they’ve provided. And honestly given the communities response, I think they’re probably right. I mean if you think about it there’s no reason someone using Centos for a proper use case wouldn’t be fine moving to Centos Stream, unless they were getting some value out of Centos production-friendly releases. Vendor compatibility and LTS patches and updates take a big team to maintain, someone has to pay for that and I feel like many were just using Centos when really they should be using a supported enterprise distro.

I found it notable that the linked RHEL post had zero mention of the why of it. Seems like a glaring omission.

Can you define a rug pull?

Promising to support an OS for 10 years then cutting that support to just 2 out of the blue?

The question I’m trying to answer is who promised what, where was that published, and when was it published. If a squirrel promised me 10 years of support, that’s different than a CentOS maintainer making that same promise on the wiki.

The 10 years of support on CentOS 8 was published on centos.org's wiki:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

Red Hat's explanation was something along the lines that it was a wiki and not guaranteed to be accurate? I don't think editing was open to to people outside of the CentOS org.

I could completely see how one could make decisions based on that date, but I can also see how doing that could backfire. As always, a plan b is valuable.

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