[bonzini]

The thing is, Red Hat never considered the distro more than a side effect of providing a base for developing "things" that will run on RHEL. It's even written on the centos.org home page, the distro is not why CentOS existed in 2020. So the fact that users (including myself!!) enjoyed a free distro as a result was not a part of Red Hat's RHEL strategy in any way.

[kbenson]

That only makes sense if Red Hat started CentOS. They didn't. The fact that they took control of it then changed it, even the web page, and then are not effectively killed the reason people are using it, is the thing I'm upset about.

If I effectively took control of the EFF and then a couple years later changed the website copy to say that the EFF is a vehicle for litigating cases that kbenson thinks are important, and then actually changed its actions to do so, would you argue the same points? How is this any different? Something that was a net good for many people has been taken over and eventually killed. I think we're all worse off for that.

[bonzini]

> I think we're all worse off for that.

I don't disagree.

[Fnoord]

IBM is all about expensive support contracts. We cannot afford RHEL. So we went with CentOS 7 and recently CentOS 8. I migrated some machines from 7 to 8. Turns out I did that for one year. My boss wasted precious money there, and it isn't getting us closer to RHEL. My take is its getting us closer to Debian Stable instead. Which is RedHat's loss because a migration to RHEL is then more out of the picture. They know this. They thought of the above. And they are fine with it. That is not a technical decision, as you said. It is a business decision.