Why Red Hat Dropped Free CentOS and What It Means for Your Servers

On December 8, Red Hat announced that it will discontinue the free CentOS Linux distribution, effectively ending the community‑maintained “free” version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

CentOS will be replaced by CentOS Stream , a rolling‑release distribution that serves as a upstream development branch for RHEL. Red Hat will continue to support CentOS 7, but support for CentOS 8 will end at the end of 2021.

If you are running CentOS 8 in production and are concerned that CentOS Stream may not meet your requirements, Red Hat recommends migrating to a commercial RHEL subscription or building your own distribution from the RHEL source code.

CentOS has long been popular among open‑source communities and operations engineers because it provides a free, stable, and high‑performance clone of RHEL. Technically, CentOS is built from the same source code as RHEL, with trademarks and branding removed, so the two are functionally identical, though CentOS releases lag behind RHEL.

Other RHEL‑based derivatives, such as Oracle Linux, also exist. In China, a large number of users rely on CentOS due to its free licensing model.

After Red Hat’s acquisition of the CentOS project, its role became ambiguous. Red Hat now maintains three major Linux distributions: Fedora (an experimental upstream), RHEL (the commercial enterprise product), and CentOS (the free downstream rebuild). Post‑acquisition, CentOS is positioned as a free RHEL‑compatible release.

In 2020, Red Hat introduced CentOS Stream , a “mid‑stream” rolling release that sits between Fedora and RHEL. Its goal is to create a feedback loop where community improvements flow back into RHEL.

According to the announcement, the focus will shift from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream over the next year. CentOS Linux 8, a rebuild of RHEL 8, will reach end‑of‑life in 2021, and CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024. Operators must decide whether to purchase a RHEL subscription, rebuild the distribution themselves, or migrate to another Linux variant.

Red Hat’s lifecycle for RHEL (and thus for CentOS) is shown in the table below:

After the CentOS Stream release, it will continue as the upstream development branch for RHEL. Fedora remains the first upstream, but once a new RHEL version is released, CentOS Stream will roll forward on top of it, feeding mature updates back into RHEL.

CentOS Stream also becomes the core of the CentOS Special Interest Group (SIG) collaboration, giving contributors influence over RHEL’s future. Red Hat states that shifting investment to CentOS Stream is the best way to drive Linux innovation.

While CentOS Stream can be used as a regular, periodically updated distribution, Red Hat advises against using it in production environments without careful evaluation.

Large IT companies such as Facebook have already migrated millions of servers to operating systems derived from CentOS Stream, and Red Hat encourages partners and developers to not only participate in CentOS Stream but also to create their own downstream branches.

Beyond CentOS Stream, Red Hat offers additional platforms to meet diverse needs:

Fedora – the upstream project for cutting‑edge Linux features.

Red Hat Universal Base Image – a free, redistributable image for building containerized, cloud‑native enterprise applications.

RHEL Developer Subscription – a free, self‑supported subscription that provides a development and testing environment on top of RHEL’s stable, secure, high‑performance base.