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IDK if I fully answered WHAT CentOS is. CentOS WAS a completely 1 to 1 compatible RHEL operating system that was started by the community and given fully 100% free. Years ago, idk maybe 5-10 at this point, Red Hat went to the CentOS devs and said, come work WITH us. Not FOR us, but WITH, but we’d pay you (somehow I’m not sure on the financial details), us so we can help you make this better. Because they saw CentOS as a good onboarding ramp to sales of subscriptions for RHEL.
Myself, and others, worried that this was the end CentOS, but they kept moving forward.
A couple years ago while I was at Red Hat, Red Hat decided that the gap between Fedora and Red Hat was too large. So they were going to pivot CentOS into CentOS Stream so that developers could build against CentOS Stream and expect it to work in RHEL. Myself and many others inside of Red Hat were VERY vocal this was a bad idea, but we didn’t matter and even my mentor told me this was a good thing for RHEL. I didn’t care, RHEL was fine, I cared about CentOS going away. So now they’re turned CentOS into their play thing. And they’re forcing people to build against CentOS Stream, which IS NOT stable RHEL.
So if I’m understanding this righf( from your explanation combined with this hackaday article i found)
https://hackaday.com/2023/06/23/et-tu-red-hat/
It used to be that Fedora was upstream for RHEL and centos was compatible with it.
Then it got changed to centOS stream which is now upstream from RHEL and and downstream from Fedora. However not every feature from CentOS Stream makes it to RHEL, but most bug fixes are, even sometimes having to backport bug fixes to older versions of the software.
Now however (since centOS no longer exists) there’s no publicly available option that’s binary compatible with RHEL without access to the RHEL Source which is now locked behind a developer account and is not licensed for redistribution.
Am I getting that right?
That’s my understanding.
The only caveat being that Rocky and Alma have stated they’re attempting to figure things out. Something similar, though I can’t remember the exact change, happened like 10 years ago and everyone thought CentOS would die.
If there’s one thing I have faith in is that open source always finds a way. It’s not just you figuring something out. It’s entire communities of insanely brilliant and PASSIONATE folks. Never underestimate the passion that drives these folks. Red Hat does.