In an announcement on Tuesday, Red Hat's Rich Bowen said CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, would be decommissioned at the end of 2021.

Instead, Bowen said, "The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release."

Oracle buys Sun: Solaris Unix, Sun servers/workstation, and MySQL went to /dev/null.

IBM buys Red Hat: CentOS is going to >/dev/null.

Note to self: If a big vendor such as Oracle, IBM, MS, and others buys your fav software, start the migration procedure ASAP.

— The Best Linux Blog In the Unixverse (@nixcraft) December 8, 2020

This means that CentOS will stop being a stable distribution, but instead will serve as a testing ground for Red Hat. Support for CentOS 7 will continue, but support for CentOS 8 will end on 31 December 2021.

Red Hat has long maintained two distributions, Fedora and RHEL, the former being free and the latter requiring a licence which costs in the thousands.

For a long time, CentOS served as a means whereby people could use RHEL without the costs of support. It was merely RHEL with the trademarks, the only thing which was copyrighted, removed.

The timeline *you published* for CentOS 8 stated May 2029 as the EOL for it. NOT December 2021. There is no way we can change our plans for the future with this short notice. The WHOLE IDEA of CentOS was an environment that wouldn't change for a long time. This is NOT that.

— Matt Phelps (@mwlphelps) December 8, 2020

CentOS users have not taken kindly to the decision, with one saying: "This is dumb. The entire premise and the only reason anyone uses CentOS is because it's rebuilt RHEL. Congratulations on undermining that, nitwits."

Another said: "What an unprecedented betrayal of a FOSS community. Looks like my decades of using RHEL/CentOS are coming to an end because they simply can’t be trusted."

A third, Sam Callis, wrote: "I have been using CentOS for over 10 years and one of the things I loved about it was how stable it has been. Now, instead of being a stable release, it is changing to the beta testing ground for RHEL 8. And instead of 10 years of a support you need to update to the latest dot release. This has me, very concerned."

My off the cuff reaction to the CentOS announcements around CentOS and CentOS Stream is that we won't be using CentOS going forward. With five years (or less) of release support, we might as well use Ubuntu like our other servers.

— Chris Siebenmann (@thatcks) December 8, 2020

And a fourth, Jason, echoed similar statements, saying: "This is disappointing and frustrating. If I wanted something that tracked ahead of RHEL, I would use Fedora. I use CentOS because it tracks after RHEL, with all of the benefits thereof.

"That said, how is CentOS Stream different from Fedora since they both track ahead of RHEL and therefore seem to meet the same need, and how does it provide value for us, the end users?"

Another user, Matt Phelps, accused Red Hat of a breach of trust. "This is a breach of trust from the already published timeline of CentOS 8 where the EOL was May 2029. One year's notice for such a massive change is unacceptable. Move this approach to CentOS 9."