CentOS is dead, long live CentOS Stream

I don't think this is what you are trying to say, but... yes, that's very much what this announcement brings for me. When Red Hat brought CentOS inside, Red Hat was in the midst of a transition from being a single-product company to a porfolio-product one. This caused a lot of friction between Fedora and what were then called "layered products". CentOS as a closer-to-RHEL base was seen as a solution for this. The hope was that CentOS would provide a more-RHEL-like community place for work like RDO (OpenStack) or oVirt or OpenShift to happen. That was partially successful, but the plan wasn't really realized.

From a Fedora point of view, "Fedora is failing at a thing we need so we'll turn to CentOS" wasn't a healthy dynamic for either project, but the overlap has been uneasy and sometimes confusing. There was talk of waterfalls and virtuous cycles and something about a coffee percolator, but mostly it was just a mess. I mean, just look at the title of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6jHWC2MrZg.

The CentOS Stream arrangement makes everything much more clear. We no longer need to resort to impossible geometry to describe the relationships!

There was an internal presentation featuring a "layer cake" model which I really liked, which went something like this:

Blue: Community space | Fedora Linux | community engineering decisions | community support

Purple: Shared space | CentOS Stream | transparent Red Hat engineering decisions with community input | community support

Red: Product | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat engineering decisions with customer input | product support

Now, "Red Hat engineering decisions" might seem a bit scary, but consider that in CentOS Linux, all of the distro-contents engineering decisions were also made by Red Hat, but inside without any transparency. And if you're unsure about community engineering decisions and Fedora's independence … buy me a beverage sometime and ask me about Btrfs!