Red Hat senior vice president and chief technology officer Chris Wright announced that The CentOS Project is changing course completely, to say goodbye to CentOS Linux, to focus on CentOS Stream. Also, CentOS Linux 8, as an equivalent of RHEL 8, will be history by the end of 2021.
Many have been surprised since CentOS joined Red Hat. CentOS is derived from the commercial distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and has been a huge success since its inception. For smaller businesses on Linux, the ease of added services provided by Red Hat to those using its distro.
On the other hand, CentOS is binary compatible with RHEL. Because it is based on the source code published by Red Hat Inc. Likewise, for those companies where the knowledge of GNU/Linux is sufficient, they have chosen CentOS. Thus saving the cost of the services that Red Hat offers and bills.
Similarly, in the place of classic CentOS, they will ask for users who upgrade to CentOS Stream. That can be seen as an intermediary between RHEL and Fedora, at the level of RHEL beta release.
From CentOS Linux 8 to CentOS Stream
With the announcement that surprised many, the future of The CentOS Project will now be CentOS Stream. What building Red Hat Enterprise Linux means to CentOS Linux, say goodbye. Similarly, as mentioned at the beginning CentOS Linux 8 comes to an end in late 2021, almost a year from now.
Also, from that date on, CentOS Stream will be the development branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to migrating to CentOS Stream 8 the recommendation of its manager.
On the other hand, unlike normal CentOS, on CentOS Stream instead of rebuilding the original packages. Using the stable RHEL packages already formed, they now offer compilations based on the experimental packages. Unstabilized generated for the next provisional version of RHEL.
In addition, some of the interesting features of CentOS Stream. Is that it allows early access to the capabilities of future versions of RHEL. However, at the cost of beta level stability.
For both projects the advantages are obvious. On the one hand, Red Hat has access to a range of important prospective customers to expand its business. While CentOS is a reinforcement that will allow you to develop next-generation open source technology. Faster and in due course, an increase in prestige.
As a result, users of both projects will have access to a high-quality code. The result of two very talented teams, although the situation is not exactly comparable in the same sense as Fedora. Providing cutting-edge solutions to the traditional desktop, CentOS is going to do it from the business world.
To learn more, go to the official CentOS project announcement from the CentOS blog.
Conclusion
This announcement, for the business world, was a big surprise, but not everything is as bad as it seems. For if the plans they have set up do not change in the future, and it remains as it is. The benefits for both the project and the users. But for its competitors, this alliance puts business solutions to a very strong rival.
On the other hand, CentOS 7 will continue to be developed during the rest of its RHEL 7 life cycle. That is, until June 30, 2024, when it will no longer receive security updates and its support will definitely end.
In addition, CentOS Linux 9, how the distribution derived from RHEL 9 will not exist, while CentOS Stream 9 ensure from Red Hat will fulfill the same function.
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