CentOS 8 support ends in 2021. CentOS 7, as the long-term support release, will continue to be supported until its own lifecycle ends, and CentOS Stream becomes the focus. At the end of 2021 CentOS 8 stops being maintained, while CentOS 7 stays supported until 2024.
What CentOS Is
CentOS is compiled from the source code that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases under open source licensing. You can think of CentOS as RHEL with a different name and logo. Developers and companies who know Linux well but don’t want to pay RHEL support fees have always chosen CentOS to save money and still get enterprise-grade software.
What CentOS Officially Said
The project published a blog post on December 8, CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream. My translation:
The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll shift focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release. CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Meanwhile, we know that many of you have made deep investments in CentOS Linux 7, and we’ll continue to produce that release through the remainder of the RHEL 7 lifecycle.
CentOS Stream will also be at the center of a major shift in collaboration among the CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This ensures SIGs develop and test the next version of RHEL. It also gives SIGs a clear, single target instead of building and testing for two distributions. It gives the CentOS contributor community enormous influence over the future of RHEL. And it removes the confusion about what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem.
When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL 8) ends, the best option is to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8 and receives regular updates like a traditional CentOS Linux release. If you use CentOS Linux 8 in production and are worried CentOS Stream won’t meet your needs, we recommend contacting Red Hat about your options.
My Plain-Language Take
First, there will be no more CentOS 8, 9, or 10 built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source. In their place come CentOS Stream 8, 9, and 10 — which is exactly what I meant in the title: there may be no more free RHEL.
CentOS Stream is a rolling-release Linux distribution that sits between the upstream development of Fedora Linux and the downstream development of RHEL. My impression is that in the future we’ll be the guinea pigs for RHEL: once the code stabilizes, it lands in RHEL.
What I Think About This
Ever since Red Hat announced a partnership with the CentOS open source project in 2014 and the CentOS team was absorbed into Red Hat, I’ve worried — just as I did after MySQL was acquired by Oracle — that the future of this open source project would be closed off. The power of capital is real; everyone needs money to live. It’s realistic, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
My guess is that Red Hat is pushing CentOS Stream to make us the guinea pigs, wading through the minefield for the paid RHEL. Because CentOS Stream sits between Fedora’s upstream development and RHEL’s downstream development, it isn’t the final RHEL, and there’s bound to be unstable code in it. That’s why I say there may be no more free RHEL.
That said, I already migrated to Ubuntu half a year ago. I moved because CentOS felt too conservative and too slow to update — not trendy enough. A lot of new technology is built on Ubuntu, so I went with the crowd and migrated.