[z9e]

I agree, maintaining two popular distro's is pretty distracting and a potential waste of resources. But CentOS was just RHEL with the branding removed, I'm not sure it was that much of a headache to maintain.

IMO CentOS was kind of a bait to get people into the tent, and then if they needed help once using it across all of their infra they would eventually have to migrate to RHEL w/ enterprise support.

Also what confuses me here, is that they claim CentOS Stream is going to be the cutting-edge distro for RHEL... however Fedora already serves that purpose.

[pm215]

The explanation I've read for the difference between Fedora and CentOS Stream is that RHEL branches from Fedora at major releases, but those are so far apart that there could be years and massive divergences between today's Fedora and the RHEL 8.x release that's about to come out. So CentOS Stream is the dynamically updating "thing that will become the next RHEL 8.x" and Fedora is "things that will go into RHEL 9 one day". Basically CentOS changes from "whatever was in the previous RHEL point release" to "whatever will be in the next RHEL point release".

[starfallg]

Centos moving forward is "rawhide" (aka. the testing branch) for RHEL, where packages will eventually make it to stable after some testing.

[rwmj]

This is roughly it, but it's also about making the development of RHEL itself more open. I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373050

[pnutjam]

I've been watching the way OpenSuse is matching binaries with SLES. This is something CentOS never had. The binaries were generated from the same source, but inevitably had some differences.

It would be much simpler for them to provide a version of Redhat that could be run without subscriptions and some way for it to convert to Subscriptions.

[unethical_ban]

In other words, what Ubuntu does.

"Oh you want support? You want this extra server management software? Let's talk."

[apple4ever]

Right. I don't understand why there isn't RH that you can just add the EL too.

[navaati]

And it makes me more worried about Fedora to be honest, because _that_ is something that IBM could decide it doesn't like...

[lima]

Fedora is the RHEL upstream. It's very useful to Red Hat/IBM. This is where community contributions happen.