Recently Centos Linux announced to move all the efforts from rebuilding RHEL to Centos Stream, a new distribution aimed to be a bit ahead of RHEL. The web imploded with comments from unhappy people and even few of them considered to move to Oracle Linux, the other main REHL rebuild until last week. I had an interesting chat with few friends about the new move, since most of the RHEL is released under a free software licence, I believed was only a matter of time when a new group o people will consider to start another project with the same aim as the old Centos.
That happened pretty quickly, and now Rocky Linux has been announced, also Cloud Linux made their move. In spite of that, you can read many passionate comments on how IBM and RedHat betrayed the community and how many people will empty their tissue boxes because of that. Yes the move was unexpected and it will afflict especially people running Centos 8 that relied on the 10 years support (paid by RedHat's customers).
Also can sound sad and make you angry but since free software was all about users' freedom is was possible to move to another project. Nobody was betrayed, nobody was stabbed by this move, since maintaining a Linux distribution like that is expensive and we like nice things, RedHat has the freedom to spend money on what they think is best for the company. We could question the motives when they bought Centos, but we are not here for speculating. By the way, there are lots of other distribution out there, some of them are really good too or they can be good like RedHat if they grow.
Other projects had some controversial decisions, Open Office, Next Cloud and the cases are countless. When the license is respecting the four pillars of free software, the user will be free to migrate to a better alternative to remaining with the old one.
By the way, GitHub has rolled out the dark theme, this will be the next topic for the coming days. Because you know, it's cool until the next hyped technology.