At least the dude is honest though- ‘we used to consider CentOS valuable, we no longer see value in that’.
What this all is really doing though is introducing a lot of uncertainty into the RH ecosystem, and pushing people toward other distros. And that will make RH the only fish in the small and shrinking pond. Because let’s be honest- 99.9% of the people running CentOS and the like were never gonna buy RHEL to begin with.
It looks like the downstream rebuilders are already working on this and are able to extract (with a bit more work) the information they need from the stream repo. How much Redhat tries to block these approaches remains to be seen, but if they can work around this so quickly then it seems a pretty petty stunt to pull.
I'm not clear what this means for distros like Alma or Rocky which used to rebuild the SRPMs that RedHat made available. Are they now dead in the water, or is there a more indirect way for them to get to the code. It looks like the CentOS Stream repository will have all of the code released by RHEL but it's going to take a lot of work to find and extract those packages from the ongoing development, so that's likely going to difficult if not unfeasible.
This is going to be a huge pain to anyone using these distros - it's fine to say we should all move to Debian based distributions, but that sort of migration takes time and planning. If this is implemented immediately then you're going to see a ton of unpatched systems around as existing distros lose support.
I was a CentOS user for my servers, and used Fedora for desktop. Since CentOS as we knew it went away, I've been migrating to Debian-based distros. Couldn't be happier.
Now, I'm not sure IBM will care. I never gave them a dime. But I assume a large userbase is important to get developer support. And developer support is vital to getting paying customers.
Look at Windows phone, which was superior in a lot of ways, but just didn't have the app ecosystem because developers didn't think it was worth it. It's hard to get traction when you have this chicken and egg scenario.
Most businesses IT departments I have worked for mandate a Linux distribution with a big support contract to deploy anything. The Windows System Admins think it will block adoption.
The businesses quickly realised that CentOS worked as a RHEL stand in and all developers can use that.
The logic of CentOS was it was identical to production and so minimised deployment issues but everything deploys in docker now.
As long as I have a Linux based docker host (cause the windows one has weirdness), I don't care what that host is, or how it is configured.
This now reflects in developer environment, I will write guides for Debian (because Snaps), devs can run whatever they want. I specify Ubuntu LTS for production since you can get a support contract for it.
I personally have been using Ubuntu LTS, Alpine and Debian for all my server and container needs so far. But I'm looking forward how this will play out at work where we exclusively use AlmaLinux, OpenShift and OKD for all our deployments and containers. We even migrated specific containers with 3rd party tools to AlmaLinux so we didn't have to deal with debian specific CVE's.
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