I also have a video version of this post (in case you're more visually inclined): Red Hat and CentOS When Red Hat took over the CentOS project back in 2014, there was a mixed, but mostly positive reaction. The CentOS maintainers were sometimes having a hard time keeping up with upstream changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and major releases like version 7 and 8 were challenging due to the required architecture changes. So Red Hat's willingness to come in and backstop CentOS was generally a good thing—for a time. Last month, Red Hat dropped a bombshell: CentOS users who had started adopting CentOS 8 and expected support for stable releases until the end of the 2020s would get just one year of support.