If my recollection of the history is correct, CentOS and Princeton EL 
were separate from SL.  CentOS originally was a "volunteer" effort 
building from RHEL source, with RH personnel monitoring the CentOS 
"lists" because CentOS had a wider range of an installed base on 
enthusiast and home user systems, in addition to "professional" systems 
(such as the HP Zbook laptop workstation that I use).  The earlier SL 
major releases had some differences in the base installed system from EL 
"stock", whereas CentOS did not.  Later major releases of SL essentially 
were the same in the "base" as EL (in all cases, logos must change).  I 
never worked with the Princeton release.  When RH (not Fedora -- real 
production RH) was an executable installable supported distro, pre-EL, 
we used that, licensed for free for "personal" use.  Prior to RH, I was 
using Debian (the GNU Linux), and once RH had no executable installable 
supported distro, I switched to CentOS. I then switched to SL because 
CentOS was having issues and SL was professionally produced 
(Fermilab/CERN) with the level of professional support we needed (that 
is, this list, plus Fermilab SL support staff who would fix some things 
-- such as inconsistencies or missing components in the standard SL 
distro -- we do NOT need nor use "commercial cradle to grave" 
handholding support, unlike the University IT division for which 
everything essentially is outsourced to for-profit vendors, as part of 
the USA scheme for public funding of private for-profit entities and 
wealth transference to the wealthy. With the demise of SL 8 and the 
purchase of RH and CentOS by IBM, I switched to Ubuntu LTS.  If 
Canonical goes the way of RH, then I suppose I will look at Debian again.

On 12/9/20 10:47 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>>> Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this.
>> I guess that CERN was caught red-handed as well.
> 
> (wrong metaphor? you wanted "with pants down" or "off guard" or something like that?
> there is no evidence that CERN was "in" on this change, yes?)
> 
>> They have already started to port their internal systems to CentOS8 according to the
>> recent site report at HEPiX:
>> https://indico.cern.ch/event/898285/contributions/4015535/attachments/2120621/3569557/CERN_Site_Report_-_HEPiX_Autumn_2020_v2.pdf
> 
> As one may remember, CERN Linux, SL and CentOS only exist because CERN could
> not agree with Red Hat on the licensing scheme for LHC-scale computing.
> 
> (I guess, at the LHC scale, even small numbers like $1/license become unworkable).
> 
> 
> BTW, in other news,
> 
> I see the CentOS wiki was changed to read "CentOS-8 full updates and Maintenance Updates"
> from "May 2024 and May 2029" to "December 2021 and December 31, 2021",
> see
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product&d=DwICaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g&s=CaCDrxtp7Ka4fRCXAiVCT34Zxxx_VD19P2hQeMXliqs&e= 
> and
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product-3Faction-3Drecall-26rev-3D122&d=DwICaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g&s=dx8Ilr6PNf35kZ8hodzZ5JC9z40X9p5iMktTifR_C34&e= 
> 
>