Bad mojo

There are many examples of companies that didn't last very long after having been acquired by IBM. In a process called blue washing, IBM replaces the processes, corporate culture and philosophy of the new acquisition with those of its own. This routine inevitably leads to the complete assimilation and absorption of the company's original identity until nothing is left of it.

It is thus no surprise that IBM's spectacular takeover of Redhat in 2018 was met with considerable scepticism and sometimes outright concern. And rightly so: a few days ago Redhat announced the end of CentOS as we know it. Ironically, those who recently upgraded from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 to get support until 2029 instead of 2024 now have only one year left.

CentOS Stream is not a viable replacement for the most common use case of CentOS, namely, running software suites certified for Redhat as I've described previously on this blog (part I, part II). New distributions filling the gap that CentOS will leave have been announced (Rocky Linux, Project Lenix), and we will see if and when they materialize, and how long they last. In the meantime, I'm glad that I generally avoided Linux distributions with a commercial background.