4 ms·

AFAICT, that's why they "bought" CentOS: to embrace-extend-extinguish it. There was no mistake about it.

• lproven 3y ago
  In hindsight, that does look plausible. However I'm not sure that the timeframe supports it. The company acquired the CentOS organisation in 2014, and it didn't kill off the free Linux distro until 2020. That's a pretty big gap.
  • 2b3a51 3y ago
    And the decision to withdraw CentOS 8 was taken quite suddenly, part way through the advertised 10 year lifetime of EL8. And the free RHEL development licence offer wasn't ready to go the day of the announcement - there was a delay of some months. I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.
    • omniglottal 3y ago
      So...IBM, huh?
    • passthejoe 3y ago
      The decisions seem rushed, not borne out of consensus, and not well thought out
  • mjw1007 3y ago
    I think the existence of Scientific Linux was one of the things keeping RH honest until then. In 2019 the Scientific Linux developers announced they would stop development and collaborate on CentOS instead. At that point Red Hat had captured the RHEL-clone world, leaving them in a position to destroy it.
    • geerlingguy 3y ago
      There's still Springdale / PUIAS, out there just trying to do their thing... not sure what route they'll take. I remember trying out PUIAS for a short time back when CentOS was having a lot of community issues.
    • passthejoe 3y ago
      This exactly