> 1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones. It would be trivial to just put the actual RHEL8 iso as an unsupported download on their ftp/www server and sell the support separately, like Oracle or Canonical do. Instead, they kept this ridiculous make work project called CentOS around, that involved non-trivial manual labor meticulously rebranding RHEL into RedHat owned CentOS, whose users apparently mainly value it for being as close to RHEL as possible without paying. To a distant observer, the whole setup looks quite absurd. I think it's actually good that they finally put an end to it. But they should have either not started CentOS 8 at all or rode it out till the end. Pulling the plug at 20% of it's lifetime is plainly a shitty move.

But [they do](https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download). A subscription buys you updates and support. RHEL itself is free. In addition, considering that almost all of Red Hat's products are "upstream first", branding is generally a single additional RPM which changes some colors. It is _not_ hard to rebrand RHEL

> 2. It appears that building a legal RHEL8+ clone is quite a task, and I'm guessing the amount of work involved is largely controlled by Red Hat Inc. I.e., they can make running/maintaining a project like Rocky or others more and more expensive if they choose to. I believe they going to test the limits of how difficult they can make building from their sources within the boundaries of the GPL. If you think I'm wrong, just put up a mirror of the RHEL8 (not CentOS8) SRPMs and see how long it stays up. Clearly they're not acting in the spirit of the GPL, if they are in the letter.

The only case in which this has happened is changing the packaging of the kernel-sources SRPM so Oracle could not pick and choose particular patches, and instead had to deal with a single massive diff to make stuff like kpatch work. The "expensive" part of building an EL8 clone is standing up a bunch of Koji builders. That isn't necessary either, strictly. It just makes "turn this SRPM into an RPM and combine it with a bunch of others into a temporary repo we can dogfood/release" easier. As always, it comes down to cost.

> 3. Given the previous point, I believe a project like Rocky is a losing proposition. If the "community" really values enterprise stability so much, better put the effort into an extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu, and preparing for transition away from RHEL. Or just pay up, if you really believes the RHEL stability is so valuable. Clone projects are by necessity extremely dependent on actions of Red Hat Inc which has largely opposite interests. I don't know why people would volunteer for that.

The problem with this, broadly, is that the "community" is comprised of a lot of Red Hat-employed engineers. This idea that Linux is a bunch of "community" people that RH/IBM/whomever siphon off is completely fallacious. Sure, they exist, but the vast majority of Linux development is commercial. Some bug is reported in a downstream product that a customer pays for, or a feature is requested by a major customer (or the technical debt involved in maintaining something gets too high, or whatever), and professional engineers who are being paid to work on it write the patches upstream. Once they're merged, they get picked downstream into some kind of productized version.

Given that most of that happens in Fedora (or OKD, or oVirt, or whatever upstream is for a given product), CentOS being run by RH was pretty much the same embrace+extend+extinguish philosophy. The vast majority of RH engineers run Fedora, or an EL clone, and that isn't gonna change. What's different is that RHEL is no longer a growing revenue stream, and CentOS users didn't convert to RHEL at a large rate (or they reported CentOS bugs against RHEL, which is strictly against Red Hat's support policy).

What customers values is indemnity and the ability to point their finger at someone external, plus normal stuff like a security response team and responsible+timely disclosure during major CVEs. What the community value(d|s) is the ability to run commercial software that the vendor supports on RHEL without actually _paying_ for RHEL. It's not that they value 'enterprise stability'. It's that they value being able to run SAS or whatever without hacking the hell out of the installer. That isn't offered by an extra-LTS fork of Debian or Ubuntu, and no amount of complaining on Hackernews is gonna change that.