What will this mean for Fedora? Doesn’t Fedora already occupy the niche of “Redhat-unstable”?
CentOS Stream will be the upstream for RHEL minor branch development. This is actually a huge thing that I think people are missing: previously, once branched from Fedora, RHEL development did not happen in the public eye. With Stream, it will. This is huge and awesome good news. However, that development will still be entirely Red Hat curated. This is different from Fedora, where we make community decisions with Red Hat's engineering input as a stakeholder but not the decider. (See for example btrfs as the default filesystem.)
My guess is that Stream turned out way less popular than their sponsored hoped (who cares if it's developed in the public eye if it's entirely RH curated anyway). So CentOS 8.x had to die.
So why the negativity at this "huge and awesome good news"?
And you know that's not the reason for the negativity, so I don't know why you're being so flippant about this. Nobody has a problem with the idea of 'CentOS 8 Stream'. They have a problem with this being the replacement to CentOS 8 Linux because it doesn't fulfill the same use-cases.
* Use cases which actually despite the fears will be covered just fine by Stream * Use cases which will be covered by the upcoming expanded no-cost/low-cost RHEL programs * Use cases which, yeah, aren't covered
It's my estimation that the first two are actually the vast majority. I don't mean to be flippant (it was a long day). understand that people who are mostly in the third case are angry and disappointed, but from what I've seen in talking to people both when Stream was launched and after this announcement, at least some large number who are worried that that's their situation are going to be actually getting something better when the dust settles.
> CentOS Stream is focused on the next RHEL minor release. This means we are improving and influencing the shipping releases of RHEL. Fedora ELN is a testing area for changes that may occur in the next major release of RHEL.The CentOS Project cannot and does not speak for Fedora