Karsten Wade, at Red Hat and has served on the CentOS Governing Board since its inception, tried to clarify the reasons for the changes in the CentOS project. In 2003, Red Hat split the Red Hat Linux distribution into two projects – commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux and free Fedora Linux, which were positioned as a fast-growing distribution with a short support cycle, suitable for testing new technologies for future new RHEL branches.
The ability to install Red Hat Linux free of charge was lost and, in response to the need for a stable, conservatively updatable and long-term maintainable distribution, the CentOS project was created by enthusiasts. CentOS filled the niche of a free industrial distribution that is fully compatible with RHEL, but did not solve the problem with the openness of RHEL development. The termination of the development of classic CentOS in favor of CentOS Stream was a kind of compromise that allowed us to move the RHEL development process to open rails and provide third-party community members with the opportunity to participate in the development of RHEL.
Instead of rebuilding ready-made RHEL packages, the creation of which the community previously could not could not influence, CentOS is being transformed into an upstream project for RHEL and will act as the basis for its development. Third parties will be able to control the preparation of packages for RHEL, propose their changes and influence decisions. It claims that the new CentOS will be able to cover 95% of the workflows for which classic CentOS was used, and for the remaining applications Red Hat intends to provide additional RHEL-based solutions, such as an extension of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer program, which defines the areas of free use of RHEL.
The transformation of the main CentOS project instead of the parallel development of a separate continuously updated branch of CentOS Stream is due to the unwillingness to spray forces on two fronts – according to Red Hat, trying to do two opposite things will lead to both of them being done poorly. By focusing on CentOS Stream, the company hopes that the result can be a coherent and reliable distribution that meets the needs of the community.