Because CentOS was once an independent project and Redhat promissed to keep Centos 8 alive till 2029.

Security patches are not backports, they are security patches that obviously should be for free, Redhat is making loads of money off free software already.

Something like RHEL 6 is running on a 2.6 Linux kernel, all security patches has to be backported. That is an EOL kernel. Almost all versions of the software bundled with RHEL 6 have been EOL from upstream providers during it's ten year lifetime. Of cause you're free to try to attempt to applied any patches yourself, you don't have to pay.

If RedHat promised to keep CentOS 8 around for 9 more years, then yes, that is very disappointing. It was a stupid promise to make in the first place, but still disappointing.

I mean, yes? Backporting fixes and security patches is the entire point of RHEL/CentOS/OEL. And indeed it's upsetting precisely because CentOS was supposed to be supported into 2029 - https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

Agree, "customers" who use CentOS are not paying for Linux and won't pay for any other distro. Somebody has to work to provide a stable distro and supported on many hardwares, hypervisors/clouds and softwares running on top of OS. But the funny things is that usually there is a huge contradiction on people who uses CentOS on production, they are the same people who pays for proprietary software like Windows, Office, Oracle DB, VMware, etc... sometimes spend millions of dollars on these softwares, but save some bucks using a free Linux distro!! But I do respect the ones who are entirely open source, just don't think any big company besides Google for example, would have a huge IT teams to support everything

I disagree I think RHEL and CentOS go/went hand in hand. With RHEL being used and licensed depending on the project or the environment. Binary compatibility and the uniformity of managing both being the big selling point.

Now the closest alternative is Canonical with Ubuntu Server which can be installed wherever with no strings and support purchased as required.

Yeah but how long before Canonical pull the same move as RedHat? The way i see it, Canonical is trying to build a moat (lastly with Snap).

I think I'm going back to Debian for my servers. i wish they add 10 years lts though.

>i wish they add 10 years lts though

I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? I mean this is such an arbitrary number. If RHEL started offering 50 year support, people will complain that Debian is 1/10th of RHEL.

> I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ?

The ideal situation is never having to upgrade: you buy your computer, install the operating system, and it works the same until you retire it. If your computer has a 5 year warranty, you expect to use it for at least 5 years before retiring it.

A 5 year LTS is only 5 years if you install the moment it's released, but that's not usually the case; for instance, there's a new Ubuntu LTS release every 2 years, so in the worst case your LTS installation will last only 3 years. Now consider the "10 year" RHEL LTS: in the worst case (you installed RHEL 7 just before RHEL 8 was released), your LTS installation will last 5 years, perfectly matching the warranty period.

I'd take 50 years in a heartbeat. I'm barely Linux literate and I have many many more pressing things to do than upgrade servers.

If you want to know more I wrote about it in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914

Imagine you're a web hosting provider who builds their business around automation tools and control panels and whatnot tailored for CentOS 8. You really don't want to have to rewrite it all every couple of years because that's not where your business's value comes from. Also, updating will break a huge number of your customers' sites and apps, which will piss them off and bury your already slender profit margins in support costs.

Most of those hosting customers are not tech companies building fractionally "innovative" CRUD SaaS apps. They're SMEs who use their apps and databases to do real work: organizing their employees, procurement, running payroll, managing delivery routes, order and stock management — boring stuff like that. They very much do not want to have to significantly rewrite the back-office systems their businesses rely on because the OS changed under them. They want it to keep working for decades with as little redevelopment as possible.

Debian is exactly like CentOS - community driven. The exact same thing could happen there.

If you want guaranteed updates backed by a contract, choose Ubuntu or RHEL.

Debian is not yet acquired and seems to never happen near the future, that's big difference.

It will hurt indirectly, because a lot of developers/devops/sys admins get skills working on CentOS which are then portable to RHEL. Now they won't. Network effects of being popular are significant.

It's a network effect. If you are always around EL machines, you're going to know, want to work with, and recommend EL machines.