Red Hat ends the RHEL clones’ free lunch
For decades Red Hat has led the enterprise Linux market, but as popular as its eponymous Linux distribution might be, CentOS 7 is orders of magnitude more widely used—20 times as popular, by my back-of-the-envelope estimate. And while CentOS once masqueraded as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, the company changed all that in late 2020 with the introduction of CentOS Stream. So far, so good, so what, right?
Wrong. Red Hat announced that CentOS 7 will be end-of-lifed in June 2024 (goodbye security patches and software updates). More recently, Red Hat announced that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For enterprises doing long-term IT planning, which is almost any enterprise of reasonable size, now is the time to consider what to do post-CentOS 7.