[fChk]

I'd be very interested to hear @fChk's comments on this, since he's a very experienced and expert user of CentOS.

Not much If it's not my own rant on the subject, so I'll leave that out :-)

This story was overdue really ever since 2 key events took place:
1> The acquisition of CentOS by RedHat in 2014
2> The acquisition of RedHat by IBM on July 2019 (Press release)

Basically, the classic capitalistic trend of Big Fish eats small Fish towards concentration and monopolization as the end-game.

What changes really here is that CentOS is going from being a stable down-stream RHEL (stripped from all enterprise-support) subset to a less stable up-stream RHEL; a beta version in other-words.

This effectively will upset a lot of communities who relied on a reliable FREE RHEL subset. And what you read Online on this subject is the expression of that RAGE (/felt as a betrayal.)

Clearly it makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint from the IBM perspective. RedHat knows that even RHEL may lose long-term if the majority of the CentOS community shift to Debian or Ubuntu LTS and issued a blog post on the matter:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-st...rise-linux
It's worth reading.

As to what's next for me, well, I consider myself more of a developer than a system manager, hence why I've chosen Fedora as my daily system; and there isn't too many systems as cutting edge as Fedora out there. Thus CentOS stream will still be OK no doubt.

Last point, checking this FAQ one can read:

Q3: Will the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux continue to appear on git.centos.org?

A: Yes, the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to be published on git.centos.org. Nothing will change about how the source code is published. This change is only related to the binaries the CentOS Project is building and how they are published.

So, the community by making use of the published source code, thanks to the GPL licence, can still re-create another stable down-stream RHEL subset (similar to CentOS Linux.) And in fact there is already a project taking this road but still in gestation.
https://rockylinux.org/
https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky

The problem here -as always- is that without sound financing the project will hit the wall, just like CentOS in 2014 which needed RedHat intervention/acquisition...