Linux Server Operating Systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Beyond
A few years back, things were relatively simple regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you needed support, you’d get a contract with Red Hat. If you didn’t, you’d run the community RHEL distro, Community Enterprise Operating system (CentOS).
Things have changed.
First, Red Hat had long known that most RHEL-family customers were using the free CentOS rather than paying for RHEL. So, back in 2011, Red Hat incorporated its own patches directly into its kernel tree. All the code’s still in there, but, as one person said then, “It’s sort of like asking someone for a recipe for the family’s chocolate chip cookies and getting cookie batter instead.”
That didn’t stop groups and companies like Oracle, which had been copycatting RHEL in its Oracle Linux since 2006, from making their own RHEL clone cookies.
In 2014, Red Hat “adopted” CentOS, hoping to convert its users into RHEL customers. That didn’t work. So in 2020, Red Hat changed CentOS from being a stable RHEL clone to being a rolling Linux release distro, CentOS Stream. That’s not the same thing at all. As one user said, “The use case for CentOS is completely different than CentOS Stream. Many, many people use CentOS for production enterprise workloads, not for dev. CentOS Stream might be OK for dev/test, but it is unlikely people are going to adopt CentOS Stream for prod.”