Apparently Red Hat have decided that they had enough of people using RHEL for free via CentOS by deciding to stop supporting CentOS 8 at the end of 2021 in favor of CentOS Stream 8.
CentOS Stream is apparently intended to function as an upstream project for RHEL, so it is not a 1:1 replacement.
In my humble opinion, stream is not an enterprise linux distribution, so this looks bad for people using CentOS.
I suppose we should have figured out something like this would happen eventually, given that scientific linux decided to not do a RHEL 8 clone, RH got acquired by IBM and RH took over the CentOS project (happened a while ago).
The only "free" EL-based alternative is Oracle Enterprise Linux, but honestly who wants more Oracle in their life?
CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream – Blog.CentOS.org
blog.centos.org
CentOS Stream is apparently intended to function as an upstream project for RHEL, so it is not a 1:1 replacement.
In my humble opinion, stream is not an enterprise linux distribution, so this looks bad for people using CentOS.
I suppose we should have figured out something like this would happen eventually, given that scientific linux decided to not do a RHEL 8 clone, RH got acquired by IBM and RH took over the CentOS project (happened a while ago).
The only "free" EL-based alternative is Oracle Enterprise Linux, but honestly who wants more Oracle in their life?