Comment by jlgaddis

I haven't made it through all of the comments on this thread yet but, in case it hasn't been mentioned, HN'ers who are using AWS may be interested in knowing that, Amazon Linux (i.e., the official Amazon Linux AMIs) also appears to mostly be a clone of RHEL.

I can't be certain as I've just barely played with it but, from first appearances, it sure seemed very similar to RHEL and CentOS!

I don't know if AWS is starting with RHEL and rebuilding everything from source and "re-branding" it like CentOS does or if they're starting with CentOS and then rebuilding and rebranding that -- or perhaps I'm completely incorrect and they aren't doing anything of the sort -- but any future changes or decisions (by IBM/Red Hat) that impact the development or future existence of CentOS could very well affect the future of Amazon Linux as well.

That's certainly something to think about if you use the Amazon Linux distribution, just like I -- and, I imagine, a ton of other CentOS users -- am wondering right now about the future of CentOS.

The good thing is that IBM is old and slow and any decisions that might affect the future existence of CentOS will likely take a few years to actually be realized. By that I mean that I don't think we'll see 7.x affected by this acquisition -- or probably even the first couple of point releases of CentOS 8 -- but, at this point, it's anybody's guess whether 8 will live out its normal/expected lifetime and still be around 10 years after release.

As a side note, recently I've been thinking that an announcement of the release of 8.0 should be arriving any day now. I'm kinda curious if this acquisition has affected (delayed) the release of 8.0 in any way.