So why does regular CenOS exist in this day and age given its semi-official status under the RH umbrella ? Why doesn't RH just let people use RHEL without support ? Isn't it a massive waste of everyone's resources to rebuild everything and remove the trademarks? This seems like a more interesting future for CentOS to have as something different from baseline RHEL.
RedHat is the household name that everybody knows, it probably makes sense to preserve it for the project that actually makes them money.
From the perspective of a 3rd party making software targeting RHEL it's simpler as well. I don't want to have to deal with clueless users installing an unsupported OS to run my software and then asking me for support for things like "our CD drive is not supported" or "how can we patch this security vulnerability". I've enough work supporting my software, I don't want to deal with the client's clueless sysadmin on top of it.
It's a contradiction in legal terms to have a trademark that is open source and anyone can use, and legal system's resolution is to declare your trademark isn't a trademark after all.
However, upon thinking a bit more, their current strategy still makes business sense since RHEL and CentOS are silos. While the sets of users that pay for support and the ones that don't are different, if they started giving updates for free, it reduces their bargaining power in general and more so when time comes to renew support. Right now, if you stop paying for support, you cannot use RHEL any more and it won't get updates.
While they can absolutely insist the customer pay support back 5 years, the political fallout is always ugly.
They do: it's called CentOS. CentOS was acquired by RedHat in 2014, keeping an independent governance body. But the reason RedHat didn't release itself as open source was Oracle. They were rebuilding RHEL and reselling it, so RedHat closed up its process and did the bare minimum required to comply with the GPL. Brian Stevens confirmed it. So now RedHat exists in order to make money off a supported product [and fend off competitors [and enforce trademarks]], and CentOS exists to keep control over the open-source spin-off of the same. So if you want the real deal certified supported enterprise distro, you have to pay for it, and if you want an uncertified slightly-not-the-same open-source alternative, that's free.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we compete against Red Hat in a number of ways.
This makes me unhappy to connect a CentOS machine to a production network, let alone put it on the Internet.
In addition the metadata that lets you install only security updates or bugfixes is not present in CentOS.
It also makes it easier for any open source author to test their software on Red Hat, as there is always a free version available.
I suppose it will also be good for devs who just like the RHEL environment but don't need a super stable, outdated packages.
Then you are going to love Modularity and Application Streams:
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/15/rhel8-introduc...
But, if it's sort of a rolling RHEL, then this could be excellent for people who trust RHEL and want stability, but more frequent updates (which is exactly why I know lots of people using Debian Testing over Stable).
Atomic Host is being retired.
CoreOS has two branches, one which is part of OpenShift (RHCOS) and Fedora CoreOS. That's very different from the RHEL model, so it doesn't directly map.
Thats what Fedora was originally for. Fedora advancements were mainlined into RHEL, and RHEL was repackaged as Centos.
If i had to propose a theory...At worst, this is "embrace, extend, extinguish." Tacking on a vainglorious service for an already successful project thats siphoning potential customers. Centos cant directly relate their brand to RedHat, but Redhat gets to call their offering "Centos Stream" when Centos is itself a trademark? Its very suspicious.
At best, this is Redhat acknowledging that they were absolutely blindsided by Docker, Compose, and Kubernetes in RHEL7. This all existed in EPEL and customers clearly felt preferential to the offerings themselves, while RedHat had to scramble to allocate resources to Openshift, podman, and a potential ground-up fork of Docker itself into Redhat as Swarm was clearly a direct threat. SCL is dated and cludgy.
By injecting themselves into Centos, they may put themselves closer to a developer market that theyve historically not been able to tap. Startups and small businesses dont buy IBM/Redhat licenses or support. They also have a chance to react to potential disasters like Docker much faster, albeit seeing as they are a part of the big blue machine now, its hard to imagine this will help in the long run.
Sus? Sure. Illegal? Not possible. IBM holds all the trademarks here. They draw the lines where they please.
I run both Arch and Fedora, and since I think around Fedora 28 I've found that the upgrades are painless enough that it hasn't been much of an issue. The recommendation years ago was to do a full re-install of Fedora (every 6 months!) which was kind of a hassle, but these days its very simple.
So if someone wanted a free RHEL through CentOS, now CentOS is no longer a free RHEL.CentOS is now RHEL-devel.
