I always found the "C" in CentOS, the "Community Enterprise OS"... awkward. I admit I haven't been following the project very closely over the years, but true c

I always found the "C" in CentOS, the "Community Enterprise OS"... awkward. I admit I haven't been following the project very closely over the years, but true community projects look different. Look at Debian, for example - internal drama and a at times gory, public decision making process. People with very different perspectives on a unfiying vision coming together to find solutions to the problems they have, and sometimes even create. It's slow, it's not as efficient as it could be - but it's a mix of democratic and meritocratic principles that is without equal, and that, I think, will stand the test of time for as long as there is such a thing as a Free Software/Open Source community to speak of. Now CentOS's practical goal - repackaging RHEL gratis - isn't really compatible with what a true community project like Debian is about, in my view. There's no real way for the project to steer away from whatever RHEL chooses to deliver, in neither a positive or negative direction. In that sense, "CentOS Streams", as a new upstream-of-sorts for RHEL, is much more "C"-enabling that what CentOS has been before - because a community (if one will emerge, or maybe it already has) can actually take action to change their own fate, and not totally depend on whatever their Enterprise Linux Overlords decide to make happen. A pity we're not really looking for this kind of thing where I work now, and most current users of CentOS probably weren't really in it for the "C", but more for the "entOS" part. They were looking for being able to rapidly roll out RHEL clone installations, without having to pay or care about any stupid and impeding commercial licensing restrictions at all. Well, the free lunch at that particular place is over, it seems. That said, I'm curious to see what will take CentOS's place in that regard.