On Thursday, 22 June, Red Hat Vice President Mike McGrath wrote a convoluted blog post ( https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream ), the most important part of the post being:
CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.
...
Before CentOS Stream, Red Hat pushed public sources for RHEL to git.centos.org. When the CentOS Project shifted to center on CentOS Stream, we maintained these repositories even though CentOS Linux was no longer being built downstream of RHEL. The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we're addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient. The latest source code will still be available via CentOS Stream.
Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement.
In other words, the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will no longer be posted for download and rebuilding unless you have a commercial agreement with Red Hat. I've read Red Hat's reasons for this, and rather than quote any more, I will simply say that I agree with Red Hat's reasons. My attitude is that if you wanted Red Hat, then you should be honest enough to purchase Red Hat, or else use a Red Hat free ISO for personal use. But CentOS, and later Alma and Rocky Linux, took the RHEL sources, removed all the Red Hat branding, added their branding back in, built it, and then put it out for free download. I didn't particularly care for CentOS, Alma nor Rocky because simply recompiling the release source added no value. The only RHEL cloner that added any value (it pains me to say) was Oracle, with its Oracle Linux. They added some key features, the most important being Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which used up-to-date kernel sources and additional enterprise hardware support unavailable with standard RHEL. Oracle, in my limited testing, was a better RHEL than RHEL.
I'm in full support of Red Hat protecting its business. I just don't care for how Red Hat has behaved with regards to CentOS. Red Hat has become (along with Canonical and Ubuntu) an unreliable partner. I'm in full agreement with why Red Hat did what they did. I just don't care for how Red Hat did what they did.
Which brings me to another realization: corporate Linux (Red Hat and Canonical in particular) has become untrustworthy for my uses. As a consequence I'm moving over to Debian as much as possible, or if Debian derived, at least as far from Canonical as possible. When I take stock of all the Linux computers around the house, I count nearly all Debian; there's Debian itself, Linux Mint (downstream from Ubuntu), Raspberry Pi OS (downstream from Debian) and LMDE 5 (Linux Mint Debian Edition, downstream from Debian). Only one machine doesn't run Debian/Debian derived, and it runs Fedora.
What makes the Debian ecosystem of operating systems palatable to me are the flatpaks of major applications such as LibreOffice. Base Debian is more than adequate for my needs. Those needs aren't gaming, they're software development with a side of image processing and word processing. Between the power and stability of Debian, combined with flatpaks (and even AppImages), I have all I really need to continue on with Linux.
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