2004 → 2025
Twenty-one years in five acts: a fork is born, a decade of quiet LTS, the community takes the wheel, Red Hat pulls the plug — and the stream keeps flowing.
Red Hat opens the RHEL source code under the ASL. Larry Dambrot and a handful of volunteers rebuild RHEL 3 into a free distribution — CentOS, Community Enterprise Enterprise Operating System. The pitch is simple: enterprise Linux without the invoice.
The first release ships, based on RHEL 3, under the Māori codename Tikanga — “custom, convention”. Roughly 1,900 packages, and a mailing list that never quite goes quiet again.
The RHEL 4 rebuild lands the same year Amazon launches EC2 — and the first public cloud is, very largely, CentOS under the hood. The quiet distribution becomes load-bearing for the internet.
A ten-year LTS commitment. CentOS 5 becomes the default enterprise Linux for an entire generation of sysadmins: RHN-era repos, yum 3, and a support window out to 2017. If you learned Linux in the 2000s, you learned it here.
The RHEL 6 rebuild brings systemd, dnf on the horizon, and a community that has grown into conferences, a foundation-track wiki and a mirror network on five continents.
CentOS formally moves into a community-run foundation, decoupling governance from any single vendor. In August, CentOS 7 “Maipo” ships — and its end-of-life is stretched to 2024, a promise that will matter enormously six years later.
Red Hat announces CentOS Stream as the rolling development track for RHEL 8; the first builds appear in September 2017. The idea: a continuous distribution living “between development and stable” — RHEL’s future, arriving early.
Red Hat announces that CentOS 7 and 8 will reach end-of-life and that “CentOS” will mean CentOS Stream going forward. The community reacts with shock, #CentOS statements and, within weeks, two well-funded forks: Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
The mirrors stop updating. Within days, Rocky and Alma ship drop-in replacements of 8 — and the fork ecosystem that keeps the binary-clone tradition alive to this day is born out of a single quarter.
The ten-year LTS that anchored half the enterprise world reaches end-of-life. Paid ESM will keep 7 running through June 2028, but the migration wave — to Stream, Rocky or Alma — has already begun.
The current release ships in near-parity with RHEL 10: kernel 6.12, KDE Plasma for workstations, Python 3.13, hardened defaults. The stream is now indistinguishable from the RHEL you will get in a year — except it is free and current today.
The name CentOS lives on in two forms: Stream — rolling, free, the community’s default — and CentOS Plus — a subscription-backed enterprise LTS (version 12, supported to 2030). Wherever you stand on the stream, the name still means the same thing it always did: RHEL, for everyone.
Every major release, its codename and its lifespan.
| Release | Codename | Based on | Released | End of life |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CentOS 3 | TS · Tikanga | RHEL 3 | 2004-10 | 2010 |
| CentOS 4 | — | RHEL 4 | 2006-10 | 2012 |
| CentOS 5 | Tikanga | RHEL 5 | 2007-04 | 2017 |
| CentOS 6 | Sana | RHEL 6 | 2011-12 | 2020 |
| CentOS 7 | Maipo | RHEL 7 | 2014-08 | 2024-06-30 · ESM → 2028 |
| CentOS 8 | Lagrange | RHEL 8 | 2019-09 | 2021-05-31 |
| Stream 8 | — | RHEL 8 | 2019-10 | rolling |
| Stream 9 | Alva | RHEL 9 | 2022-05 | rolling |
| Stream 10 | Kandara | RHEL 10 | 2024-10 | rolling |
| Plus 12 | — | RHEL 12 | 2025 | LTS → 2030 |
# trivia: Stream 9’s codename “Alva” collides, awkwardly, with the fork “AlmaLinux”.