> The hat killed Centos because some IBM midlevel manager needed to make quota for a bonus, and they didnt stop to realize just how unsuccessful this tactic was for Oracle/MySQL.
RHEL clones were always going to exist, this is and was obvious, and there are more of them now than ever. That's not the point. The point is that now there is a way for RHEL clones, including ones from competitors like Oracle, have some way of contributing back to RHEL, whereas beforehand if you were a CentOS user your only possible course of action was to file a bug in the RHEL bug tracker and wait for a Red Hat employee to prioritize it.
The business benefit is also a technical benefit - the ability to fix bugs and add features is no longer strictly limited by the amount of engineering capacity Red Hat can contribute. Companies like Facebook use CentOS Stream at scale internally and make contributions that ultimately end up in RHEL, users and vendors have a target they can integrate against early without needing gated betas, etc.
I cannot stress enough how untrue this is. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586311
RHEL clones were always going to exist, this is and was obvious, and there are more of them now than ever. That's not the point. The point is that now there is a way for RHEL clones, including ones from competitors like Oracle, have some way of contributing back to RHEL, whereas beforehand if you were a CentOS user your only possible course of action was to file a bug in the RHEL bug tracker and wait for a Red Hat employee to prioritize it.
The business benefit is also a technical benefit - the ability to fix bugs and add features is no longer strictly limited by the amount of engineering capacity Red Hat can contribute. Companies like Facebook use CentOS Stream at scale internally and make contributions that ultimately end up in RHEL, users and vendors have a target they can integrate against early without needing gated betas, etc.