[api]

Why the hell do huge companies spend tons to acquire things and then kill them? This seems to happen more in computing than other industries. You don't see shipping companies buying completely functional container ships so they can park them out in the middle of the ocean and dynamite a hole in the hull and watch them go glug glug glug for the lulz.

[dsign]

Many reasons:

- Eliminate a competitor

- Absorb another company's team

Not all the reasons are as macabre as they sound; sometimes the bought company failed to monetize properly whatever they were doing, and their developers decided it was time to stop eating from bean cans. In those cases an acquisition can improve their diet slightly.

[slavik81]

I doubt Red Hat spent any money at all on acquiring CentOS. The OS was literally just Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the logos removed and without the subscription fee. RH probably just promised to help maintain it and provide infrastructure.

The folks who created CentOS didn't do it as a business. It was created because they wanted it to exist.

[gameswithgo]

happened to me in publishing. we had built our own online portal to our legal book products, couple million a year in revenue and growing, bought by Reuters, everything shut down, didn’t even bother to look into keeping any of our talent around either. it was weird! severance package was great though.

[rapnie]

The 'remove-competitor-while-still-cheap-to-do-so' rationale then, probably.

[rodolphoarruda]

I suspect there are far too many spreadsheet versions flying around in an acquisition process.

Once the acquired company numbers are loaded into the right spreadsheets that reflect reality in business ops, executives will see a bunch of cells in yellow and red color... which is not good.

[thrusong]

Totally just blurting out from the top of my head, but I'm guessing it's more because digital things are intangible.

The tech and talent is still being used, like the cargo ships in your example, it's just the competition that's been killed.

[dpcx]

I would think for some it's the acquihire, for some it's a way of preventing competition...

[qz2]

Yep they are bastards.

Watch Microsoft carefully.

[_ph_]

What makes you think that CentOS was killed? It will be available and actively maintained.

[em500]

> What makes you think that CentOS was killed?

Their own announcement yesterday.

> It will be available and actively maintained.

CentOS8 will not be after 31 December 2021, that's what they announced yesterday. CentOS7 will be, until 30 June 2024, according to their current status page, but who's going to trust them after what they pulled yesterday? Overnight, they changed CentOS8's End-of-life from 31 May 2029 to 31 Dec 2021. Surely you understand that that made a few people a bit upset.

The only thing actively maintained in the future will be CentOS Stream, which is not CentOS classic as people understoond and used it. CentOS classic were RHEL-release clones without Redhat branding and support. CentOS Stream is RHEL-next Beta.

[kklimonda]

Just because CentOS Stream has "CentOS" in its name does not mean it's the same thing - CentOS, as is known currently, will effectively stop existing once CentOS7 is no longer supported (not to mention CentOS8 will not even be supported for previously announced period).

[_ph_]

Yes, CentOS as a precise RH clone will be history, but there is still RH. CentOS will still be close to the next RH release and sufficiently behind Fedora to be stable by itself. So a good choice for many, who want a bit more current software than Red Hat but want to be more conservative than to go with Fedora. For many users an actual improvement. For those who want Red Hat, they should use Red Hat or one of its clones.

[soneil]

> For those who want Red Hat, they should use Red Hat or one of its clones.

That's the gripe. We were using one of its clones.