What drives me personally nuts about the CentOS saga is all the “community” hand-waving about creating a bit for bit clone of a distro.

There can be no “community just shipping builds of RHEL code as, by definition, you cannot change anything. That means you cannot contribute. In my view, an Open Source “community” cannot just be people that use things for free. It is supposed to be about collaborating to build things.

At least now we have Alma Linux which strives to be ABI compatible with RHEL but builds it themselves from CentOS Stream. They actually build something. They can actually contribute (and they do). They can innovate. For example, they have continued the x86-64v2 builds even though RHEL has abandoned them. On Alma, you can at least claim to be building a community.

I do not use any of these distros by the way, in case you think I am shilling something.

It warms my heart to see someone else recognize this. The bug-for-bug model that classic CentOS Linux followed was fundamentally broken. Sure there were lots of consumers, but without the ability to fix bugs or accept contributions it was dysfunctional. The underlying motivation of the CentOS Stream changes was resolving this conflict, so that bugs can be fixed and contributions can be merged, resulting in a more sustainable distro.