text: On 8 December 2020, the CentOS Project announced that the distribution would be discontinued at the end of 2021 in order to focus on CentOS Stream. The community's response to this announcement was overwhelmingly negative. Soon thereafter, Gregory Kurtzer (one of CentOS's founders) announced a new project to continue the original CentOS focus, which became known as Rocky Linux.  CloudLinux created AlmaLinux to provide a community-supported successor to CentOS Linux, aiming for binary-compatibility with the current version of RHEL. A beta version of AlmaLinux was first released on February 1, 2021, and the first stable release of AlmaLinux was published on March 30, 2021. A beta version of Rocky Linux was released on April 30, 2021, and subsequently on June 21, 2021, the stable release of Rocky Linux 8.4 was released.
  Design
  CentOS developers use Red Hat's source code to create a final product very similar to RHEL. Red Hat's branding and logos are changed because Red Hat does not allow them to be redistributed. CentOS is available free of charge. Technical support is primarily provided by the community via official mailing lists, web forums, and chat rooms.
  The project is affiliated with Red Hat but aspires to be more public, open, and inclusive. While Red Hat employs most of the CentOS head developers, the CentOS Project itself relies on donations from users and organizational sponsors.
  Versioning and releases
  CentOS releases
  CentOS version numbers for releases older than 7.0 have two parts, a major version and a minor version, which correspond to the major version and update set of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) used to build a particular CentOS release. For example, CentOS 6.5 is built from the source packages of RHEL 6 update 5 (also known as RHEL version 6.5), which is a so-called "point release" of RHEL 6.