As CentOS OS 7 nears end-of-life, what are the alternatives?
Thousands of servers worldwide running the CentOS operating system, version 7, are nearing their end of life, marked as the end of June, 2024. Although the software will continue to run indefinitely, it will no longer be supported by the company that created it: Red Hat.
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Until a year or two ago, CentOS was offered to the world as a byte-for-byte copy of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Edition. Operators of mission-critical servers had a choice: pay the license fees to Red Hat for support and maintenance of their fleet of machines, real or virtual, or use CentOS and take responsibility for their own patches and updates that would ensure the best possible uptime and security of the operating system and the software that ran on it. While CentOS was free, monetarily, it came, therefore, with indirect costs: paying staff to ensure services continued without a hitch.
Many organizations also deployed CentOS in development environments to ensure that new software could be rigorously road-tested on the OS before being rolled out into production. Bug fixes, optimizations and improvements would be ‘upstreamed’ – presented to Red Hat, where developers on the RHEL flagship would pull accepted changes into the next release of the operating system.
iTWire:
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CentOS 7 users will need to look for alternatives as EOL approaches
That may pose issues for some, according to observers, though some of this same class say it will not be an issue as alternatives abound.
The CentOS project, which produced an enterprise Linux distribution, was bought by Red Hat in 2014, but then shut down in December 2020, leaving many users angry. The distribution was basically Red Hat's Enterprise Linux without the trademarks, the only copyrighted portion of the code.
Six months later, Red Hat, which was bought by IBM in 2019, tightened its grip on RHEL source code, said it would make source code available only to its customers.