the CentOS Stream change (2020)
loreIT supportgovernance & risk
The 2020 decision to redirect CentOS - until then a free, bug-for-bug rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux - into CentOS Stream, positioned ahead of the enterprise release rather than behind it, and the founding of Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux in response.
It is the canonical demonstration that governance is a technical property. No code changed; what changed was who decided and on what terms, and organisations that had built long-lived infrastructure on a free enterprise-compatible base discovered their plan had no owner. The durable lesson for anyone choosing a platform: ask who can change the terms, what their incentives are, and what your exit looks like if they do - before the announcement, not after.
Also known as: centos, rocky linux, almalinux, rhel rebuild