While formal announcements used terms like joining forces, most viewed this as RedHat acquiring CentOS. In 2014, RedHat and CentOS 'joined forces'. RedHat is a company whose business model revolves around open source software, including the popular RHEL operating system that CentOS Linux is a downstream version of. The project is the driving force behind both the CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream operating systems.

However, there is also The CentOS Project. Usually, when you hear CentOS, you think of the popular CentOS Linux operating system that was first released in 2004.

Additionally, there are three organizations playing a key role in the story:ĬentOS. Of course, the community of CentOS users and developers are directly impacted by the changes. Who's involved: CentOS, RedHat, and IBMīefore we dive into what happened, let's take a look at the who's involved. Here, we'll help you unpack the details of the changes to CentOS so you can form your own opinion. RedHat and the CentOS project put a much more positive spin on things. Of course, there are two sides to every story. For the most part, community response has been negative to say the least. This is guaranteed to have an impact on anyone who wants to learn Linux.Īdd to the mix changes to the CentOS 8 support lifecycle and the fact a corporate giant (IBM) is involved, and it's easy to see why this caused a stir in the open source community. As a result, there are major implications for users who counted on CentOS stability. While CentOS Linux was basically a free version of the stable version of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS Stream will be based on the development branch.

In December, the CentOS Project made an announcement that rocked the open source world: they are shifting their focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream.

Centos 8 latest version