Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.

It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.

> Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.

A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important.

> It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.

Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support.

I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.

Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7.

AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux

Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there

I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.

They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.

The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.

They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money.

So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.

Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD.

RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.

Just stop talking.

> Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.

Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release.

Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand.

But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.

Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases

6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.