IBM bought RedHat, which in turn bought CentOS. IBM then drove a stake through CentOS' heart.
Honestly, I am happy to see CentOS die. Between EPEL, ELRepo and RPMFusion, I have wasted too much of my time managing RPM package dependency hell. I started using Ubuntu version 6.06 onwards. Five years ago, I migrated from Fedora to Ubuntu as my Linux desktop OS of choice. I then migrated all my cloud servers from CentOS to Ubuntu. Thinux, the desktop OS I maintain for @[100063777711947:2048:Thinvent], has also migrated completely from Fedora/CentOS to Ubuntu.
You can now obtain 16 licenses of RedHat for free, per organisation. Why? Why would I want to manage the license hell that is RedHat. I could tag dozens of RHEL customers here, who all hate RedHat licensing. IBM has only made their licensing more complex. So now that most (new) servers are in the cloud, RH wakes up and wants folks starting out in the cloud to get 16 free licenses. And experience not a free version of Linux, but one that is encumbered by license management, registration, and periodic compliance. Yeah, right.
What RH completes misses is that the game isn't just about the cloud any more. The bigger game is in architectures. And compared to Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora completely missed the bus on that one. Uptake of ARM instances on AWS is rising rapidly. At the desktop end, ARM uptake has been phenomenal. Thinux for ARM had zero shipments in 2015. By 2020, a majority of Thinux shipments were on ARM computers.
We had stopped ARM shipments for a few years preceding 2015. From the beginning, Thinux on ARM was Ubuntu based, while Thinux on x86 was Fedora based. The only reason for continuing with Fedora on x86 was the training ecosystem RedHat has in India. Devs trained in India are familiar with RH. So they look for /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* instead of /etc/network/interfaces. Sorry, can't serve that market any more, because the cost of keeping them served is simply too high.
RPM is so bad that I've helped the odd customer who started out using Amazon Linux, migrate to Ubuntu Linux on AWS. Whatever little they lose in performance by migrating Docker host instances from AL to Ubuntu, they gain back in compatibility and developer joy. Ubuntu was the OS of choice in the cloud when AWS started out. And continues to be the OS of choice. 16 free licenses isn't making anyone jump from a libre OS to an IBM OS.
Honestly, I am happy to see CentOS die. Between EPEL, ELRepo and RPMFusion, I have wasted too much of my time managing RPM package dependency hell. I started using Ubuntu version 6.06 onwards. Five years ago, I migrated from Fedora to Ubuntu as my Linux desktop OS of choice. I then migrated all my cloud servers from CentOS to Ubuntu. Thinux, the desktop OS I maintain for @[100063777711947:2048:Thinvent], has also migrated completely from Fedora/CentOS to Ubuntu.
You can now obtain 16 licenses of RedHat for free, per organisation. Why? Why would I want to manage the license hell that is RedHat. I could tag dozens of RHEL customers here, who all hate RedHat licensing. IBM has only made their licensing more complex. So now that most (new) servers are in the cloud, RH wakes up and wants folks starting out in the cloud to get 16 free licenses. And experience not a free version of Linux, but one that is encumbered by license management, registration, and periodic compliance. Yeah, right.
What RH completes misses is that the game isn't just about the cloud any more. The bigger game is in architectures. And compared to Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora completely missed the bus on that one. Uptake of ARM instances on AWS is rising rapidly. At the desktop end, ARM uptake has been phenomenal. Thinux for ARM had zero shipments in 2015. By 2020, a majority of Thinux shipments were on ARM computers.
We had stopped ARM shipments for a few years preceding 2015. From the beginning, Thinux on ARM was Ubuntu based, while Thinux on x86 was Fedora based. The only reason for continuing with Fedora on x86 was the training ecosystem RedHat has in India. Devs trained in India are familiar with RH. So they look for /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* instead of /etc/network/interfaces. Sorry, can't serve that market any more, because the cost of keeping them served is simply too high.
RPM is so bad that I've helped the odd customer who started out using Amazon Linux, migrate to Ubuntu Linux on AWS. Whatever little they lose in performance by migrating Docker host instances from AL to Ubuntu, they gain back in compatibility and developer joy. Ubuntu was the OS of choice in the cloud when AWS started out. And continues to be the OS of choice. 16 free licenses isn't making anyone jump from a libre OS to an IBM OS.