Changing CentOS in mid-stream

So: In all of this: What have we learned and what are some of the consequences:
* In some ways this goes back as far as the "commercial" Red Hat Linux -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Fedora split out in 2003 or so.
* Red Hat maintained a source release policy - this allowed White Box Linux, CAOS, CentOS and others to build a clone distro.
* Various of these failed - CentOS built up a large community of users - some *because* it was bug for bug compatible with RHEL.
* Lots of people benefited from the implicit ten year "don't change" of RHEL compatibility - especially universities / big projects.
* Individuals often use(d) CentOS as a proving ground/for training - CentOS users also found bugs and security holes.
* Red Hat folk sometimes recommended CentOS for others who couldn't afford RHEL / could reliably do their own support.
* Many CentOS users also have Red Hat machines and licences - hardware support for one often worked for both.
* Some users moved from one to the other for cost or other reasons.
* Once Red Hat took on CentOS, both sides benefited from a pool of experience and work others had done to some degree.

Many in the CentOS community now realise the nature of the community and that that community may be different to what they had thought: many on all sides feel betrayed / upset: goodwill on all sides has been lost. The status quo ante has changed.
The changes were poorly communicated to the widest world, even if Red Hat folk thought that everybody knew the plans.
Some folk who were expecting a ten year lifespan for Red Hat 8 (and CentOS 8) ,reasonably, based on precedent, have been caught out.
There is a change in relative position and precedence between Fedora, CentOS Streams and the final RHEL: opinions on the stability of CentOS Streams differ.

This will hit any large user who has significant numbers of machines to cope with - whether they're currently on RHEL or CentOS.
More than 750 folk have joined Greg K. to essentially attempt to replicate the state of CentOS 7 and CentOS 8 ante quo, potentially.
Cloudlinux and others have also volunteered to build a solution. Other solutions may already exist - Scientific Linux continues to supports 7.*, Springdale Linux is supporting an academic community - and so on.

Lots of folk are throwing around threats/promises to move to Debian / OpenSUSE / Others / SLES / Ubuntu (distributions alphabetically).

Ubuntu LTS has a five year support lifetime - it is stable within that time,modulo package fixes and packages that have to be removed as unmaintainable. Releases are on a fixed timeframe. You can do this for free for yourself / purchase paid for support from Canonical.
Debian releases when it's ready - but normally on a two-three year time frame at the moment. It is supported for a year after release an d there are commercially supported options for extended support. Debian stable is stable within that time modulo package fixes and packages that have to be removed as unmaintainable

Any way up that you look at it, this is a huge, previously unappreciated, change to the Red Hat model and to everyone's prior understanding and large communities of users will be affected. Those who choose to move to a different distribution will have to unlearn muscle memory and widen their skills base: everyone will have to revise their expectations.

Now can we all stop imputing to malice what can reasonably be explained by lesser /understanding on all sides, learn by the increased knowledge that we have all gained, and return to being appreciative of each other, please?