As I remarked to a RH employee when the CentOS 8 discontinuation came out - do you have any idea how much trust you have to burn that people are considering Oracle as the good option?
What's the specific difference between Oracle and IBM/RedHat in this regard? As far as I can tell Oracle has burned a lot of people because they don't do license checks in their software (no DRM of any kind), which is usually what the HN crowd wants. But the flip side is they have to check you in some other way, leading to audits, and audits are very painful.
Is the difference that RHEL does subscription checks so they don't need to audit customers so much?
In terms of open source contributions, RH certainly do more, but Oracle are no slouch. They're doing actually exciting stuff with GraalVM and I don't really remember the last time I saw Red Hat do anything describable as research, their Java stewardship has been pretty responsible, they publish quite a lot of useful tools and stuff.
This seems more and more to be the reality we are moving towards. Been dabbling with FreeBSD lately and it just works. Also, ports are updated or new submitted quite often making it feel less out of date.
That's not a decision you make and then train staff + switch in a short time. At least not beyond trivial deployments. People used CentOS so they don't have to deal with this and they will have other less-extreme options before CentOS EOL.
... you know, I had actually forgotten about that as an actual option. Yes, some people would probably be fine running Stream. I personally would avoid it because you're sacrificing stability by beta-testing Red Hat's software for them, but it is free, it is close to CentOS 8 (RIP), and it is likely to be good enough™ for many uses.
Pay for RHEL, use CentOS 7, or switch to Ubuntu.