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> Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL.

I thought that Fedora was already serving this role

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Not really. RHEL / CentOS is basically a hardened snapshot of Fedora taken every few years, with a few bespoke changes on top. So in that sense you could argue that Fedora is a front-runner for "the next RHEL" but at any point in time it is too far ahead of the current RHEL to be a useful testbed in any respect for those users. Although I guess you could argue that it helps knock down bugs in packages like GNOME that do get updated regularly in RHEL.

CentOS Stream is basically "the next x.y release of RHEL". Some updates, like GNOME updates and new hardware enablement, will be present in CentOS Stream a few months before they are released to RHEL and CentOS as part of a new x.y-release.

Yes, this is exactly it. The conspiracy theories about buying-CentOS-to-kill it are understandable but totally off-base. Red Hat brought CentOS in-house at a time when the company was trying to grow from being a single-product company to a portfolio one, and it became clear that Fedora wasn't working for what at the time RH called "layered products". The hope was that CentOS would provide a more-RHEL-like community place for work like RDO to happen. That was partially successful, but the plan wasn't really realized — and speaking from a Fedora point of view, that "Fedora is failing at a thing we need so we'll turn to CentOS" wasn't a healthy dynamic for either project. CentOS Stream serves the initial purpose better, and now RH's distro ecosystem story is actually linear rather than a crazy MC Escher contortion.

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