IBM/Red Hat Deals Crushing Blow to CentOS

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IBM/Red Hat made a move that has sent a ripple of anger through the Linux community that could negatively affect businesses.

In a move that can be best summed up with a gaping mouthed, "Huh?," IBM/Red Hat announced it is ending CentOS 8 and shifting all releases of the server operating system to the Stream edition.

What is CentOS Stream, you ask? It's a rolling release edition of the popular server platform. What is a rolling release? Instead of the traditional yearly major and minor releases, rolling releases are continuously updated, so all software (from the kernel to the user-space software) is always up to date. 

For many this means instability can be introduced to the system. For an operating system known for its rock-solid stability, the shift to a rolling release could mean disaster.

But it's not just the update process that has many a Linux admin up in arms. To date, CentOS has been downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which meant it included most of the features added to the enterprise-grade operating system. CentOS Stream, however, will be downstream of Fedora, so it will not benefit from anything added to RHEL. 

CentOS 8 admins will have until some point in 2021 to decide if they want to continue on with CentOS Stream, or find another platform.

To read more on this, check out Red Hat's official take on the shift.

12/10/2020

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