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Red Hat announces no-cost RHEL for small production environments

175 points by IceWreck 6y ago

ziml77 6y ago
After their killing of CentOS, I hope anyone who reasonably can avoids RHEL. I'm positive they're going to change policies again in the future and fuck over people who decided to go with this zero monetary cost RHEL offering. > When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux. This is a load of bullshit. If that was their plan they would have announced both of these changes together. It's not like they were under time pressure to get the announcement out.
- dralley 6y ago
  >This is a load of bullshit. If that was their plan they would have announced both of these changes together. It's not like they were under time pressure to get the announcement out. I work for Red Hat, opinions are my own, etc. I don't know why they decided to announce the CentOS plans before announcing at least some of the expanded RHEL offerings, and many people are just as confused as myself. However, whatever the reason was, it's absolutely true that expanding access to no-cost and low-cost RHEL was always the plan, and the original announcement effectively stated as much.
- freedomben 6y ago
  You've obviously made the choice to hate, but for anyone else reading this comment, the CentOS announcement specifically mentioned at the time that an announcement like this was coming regarding expanded RHEL options. Not sure what more evidence is needed that it was the plan. If you're a conspiracy person go look at archive.org's version. If you believe archive.org is in on the conspiracy, well, I'm not sure what to tell you.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Not the OP, and I have no doubt they had plans to "expand" RHEL options I also have no doubts they wanted to see how much bad PR the announcment made before figuring out that those expanded options where It was from be beginning a Monetary Grab, Redhat did a global scream test to see how much they would have to give away to take the screams down to a dull roar and stop the bleeding just enough to not lose any market share They have landed on 16 as the magic number for now, but like the OP I have visions of Darth Vader saying “I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.” while wearing a RedHat It does not fill me with confidence that I should make use of that 16 server license...
- lalatendum 6y ago
  RH was under time pressure to announce the CentOS 8 EOL dates. Because we did not want more people to move to CentOS 8 during the holidays. The programs weren't ready and we felt it was important to get the CentOS Linux announcement out as soon as possible. We had many long discussions about this in the Red Hat internal memolist when CentOS news were announced. Please search the internet for Red Hat's memolist. It takes a lot of time to come up with free programs like this, thats the simple truth. You can choose not to believe this and wait for few years to see how these turns out. It is not about immediate revenue growth but how to make RHEL evolve as the next generation OS. If RHEL does not change it will be become obsolete sooner or later.
bassman9000 6y ago
If still you need to login to access repos, same stuff.
choeger 6y ago
The production licenses for RHEL are certainly expensive, but it's not my job to decide whether they are worth it. My job is to develop and ship software to customers that used to run Ubuntu, CentOS, and sometimes RHEL. To compile/build/package that software we use docker containers, which provide nice isolation and hygiene and also guarantee user-space ABI compatibility to the target system. What I'd like to know: How can I user containers to develop for RHEL now? Is there some "short-lived" clause I could depend on or do I have to buy a license for every container I might want to spin up?
- dralley 6y ago
  Look into the RHEL Universal Base Image. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal... https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#introduction https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#introduction re: licensing, the FAQ says: Do I need a subscription to use UBI? No, the Red Hat Universal Base Images and all associated content can be used for development and deployment without the need for a Red Hat subscription. However, for a fully supported operational experience and access to an expanded list of non-UBI tools, containers built on UBI must be deployed on a Red Hat platform such as OpenShift or RHEL. Accessing non-UBI content does require a Red Hat subscription.
- chasil 6y ago
  Red Hat offers a "no support" server license for $350/year, which is the lowest licensing tier. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $800, and $1300. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-server https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser... Oracle has a larger range of tiers. The "no support" license is $120/year. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $500, $1200, $1400, and $2300. Oracle Linux can be used in production without a paid license of any kind; Red Hat Linux cannot be used in this way for large deployments (excepting the new 16-seat license for a developer account). Red Hat is aggressive with software audits; I have seen one. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ Both Oracle and Red Hat now have complete toolsets to convert support between an installed CentOS/RedHat/Oracle OS. Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL; previously a wipe and reinstall was required ("have fun reinstalling your system" is still on Oracle's CentOS site). The description looks much more thorough in replacing all possible packages with Red Hat versions: https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 Oracle does not replace CentOS or RedHat RPMs in their conversion (AFAIK), so it is much less violent on the platform changes. https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-to-oracle-linux https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-... Red Hat has terminated two major platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS. Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. The Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy. There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different.
chomp 6y ago
I appreciate the thought, but am still miffed at the "embrace, extend, extinguish" that caught me off guard here. I can't exactly pull out too many pitch forks because CentOS did let me enjoy some of their packaging labor for free. It's obvious in retrospect that their intention was to pull this when they acquired the CentOS project - plotting to turn CentOS into a RHEL on-ramp while dressing it as an embrace of the community feels like a kick in the groin. Also, 16 servers is barely enough for tech companies caught by this, and is less of a good will gesture, and more subscription growth hacking.
tux1968 6y ago
Honestly these seem like pretty generous and useful offerings. I appreciate the commitment they make to not use them as a sales channel as well. Will be interesting to see what else is offered in the coming February announcement.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  It's generous as long as you ignore the fact that CentOS used to cover all of these usecases without any restrictions on what you could use it for or how many servers you could use it on, for free, with no licensing or registration.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    But since we aren't entitled to any free product at all, it seems unkind to criticize someone for not giving as much for free as they once did. It's still generous, even if previously it was more so.
    - runlevel1 6y ago
      We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based. That's the cost of building a product on GPL2 licensed software. The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. In killing its core mission, they haven't been. EDIT: Clarify sentence.
      - tux1968 6y ago
        > We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based. Are you claiming they are in violation of the GPL license? I believe they still are 100% in compliance. > The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. They haven't. They stepped in to stewardship of the product quite naturally, with the full backing of the previous stewards. Nobody was forced into that agreement. It wasn't given to them as a gift, Red Hat has sponsored the project for the last 6+ years. The fact that you disagree with the direction it has since gone, does not mean it's wrong. It may be the difference between having something more modest, and having nothing at all. And if you want something closer to the original CentOS check out: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ Which was created by the CentOS founder.
awill 6y ago
First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. I have a single server in my home running CentOS 7. I gain nothing by using RHEL over Rocky in the future, except with RHEL I have to accept ToS, do some subscription checks, and run the risk that Red Hat cancels this programme down the road. I only see this of value for someone who actually runs real RHEL in prod, and needs to test/validate hardware/software. For anyone just wanting 'free' RHEL, they should just use Rocky.
- dralley 6y ago
  (RH Employee) > First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. I agree. >Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements.
  - arbitrage 6y ago
    yeah, stop playing games, redhat? just say what you're going to say already. i have no idea why you're trying to focus so hard on building mindshare, building a mystery around it like you're a sarah mclachlan tribute band, but you already blew it. go back to what you're good at, please.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    I understand as an RH employee you're likely not in a position to make decisions about what you can disclose when, but... (I'm sure you're aware) your first answer contradicts your second.
    - dralley 6y ago
      There's no contradiction, only an acknowledgement that (in my personal opinion) the piecemeal way these plans are being announced is understandably frustrating, but that they are legitimately serious about making RHEL easier to use across a spectrum of use cases (which the official post is pretty clear about).
zokier 6y ago
How about no-cost no-registration self-support RHEL for unlimited number of systems?
- ognarb 6y ago
  Someone need to pay for a service, not everything is free as in beer.
  - merlinscholz 6y ago
    What would be the service on this case? Redhat already is open source and is being compiled anyways.
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      So grab the source and compile it yourself. What RedHat provides is an enormous development effort and an extremely long lived LTS platform. That doesn't come for free. Many seem to want RHEL for free, but there are free alternatives. You can run: Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware, if the cost is such a huge issue. I won't argue that RedHat has handled the change to CentOS in a good way, they clearly haven't. On the other hand I don't free sorry for those companies how want all the benefits provided by RedHat, but not pay to keeping RedHat in business. Open source isn't about free, it's about giving you the option to make changes to the code yourself, or pay others to do it for you. RedHat would like to get paid for their work, if you don't want to do that, that's fine to, but then you need to do the work yourself.
      - zokier 6y ago
        There has been a freely downloadable Red Hat available for the past 20 years, either in the form of CentOS, or before it good old classic Red Hat Linux. That got them this far, where they are now. So you can understand how people feel bit miffed, especially now that they have Big Blue backing them they should be financially more stable than before.
        6y ago
isuckatcoding 6y ago
What is RHEL?
- scarmig 6y ago
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For context, CentOS was a popular Linux distro that tracked RHEL, being mostly identical except for not requiring a support package. Red Hat stopped supporting it, which put a lot of its users in a bind. This is intended to replace it.
- technofiend 6y ago
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL is a stable platform for businesses to run their apps on; they port upstream code fixes to their kernel and distribution and offer support for a price. Now that Centos and RHEL will no longer be in lockstep, some people are looking for alternatives. The upgrade from 1 RHEL license to 16 is a way for Red Hat to try and retain small projects and let home labbers and evangelists legally replace Centos rather than switch.
Cuuugi 6y ago
I'm thinking this news is related. https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-farewell-to-centos/ https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-... I'd still prefer CentOS lived, this is probably meant to keep people from grabbing pitchforks.
ehutch79 6y ago
I had to wade through a bunch of modals, and then the page kept jumping around... Doesn't engender a bunch of trust.
tpetry 6y ago
That is an interesting move. But with more and more organizations moving to dockerized services the real servers operating system is no longer that relevant. I do know that rhel provides free access to a subset of rhel packages for docker image building but so many packages are missing that you can‘t reslly use it. So next step for rhel, allowing dockerized rhel images would be nice. That is a real hurting point you created by your centos change!
- dralley 6y ago
  That's already a thing https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal...
  - tpetry 6y ago
    And as i said the rhel images for docker and supported packages in the registry is very very limited, you will miss a lot of packages.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    As someone who started testing things with UBI images, I have found them to not be that great in terms of predicting how things behave installed under CentOS or RHEL. There are a lot of seemingly minor packaging differences that cause annoying issues when you go to deploy the same stuff on a real RHEL box.
tpetry 6y ago
How does rhel count these „up to 16 systems“? So if i am using 16 physical servers with at least two virtual vmware vms on each machine. Is that setup still 16 systems or do they count the number of virtual machines?
- strzibny 6y ago
  No, I think they count every virtual machine/container. Btw. I did not check, it's possible it's based on number of CPUs or smth.
  - strzibny 6y ago
    Ok, I apologize, I wasn't sure about containers. It seems you don't count containers per se, but they have to run a base RHEL system.
strzibny 6y ago
I love this change. Will probably run things on RHEL now.
- type0 6y ago
  Why not CentOS Stream?
  - strzibny 6y ago
    I will start with CentOS Stream, but might actually switch to RHEL later. I don't really have a good rationale hah, but I was working for Red Hat and it could be cool to finally run my side project on RHEL.
abfan1127 6y ago
As someone not running these small to medium sized businesses, this is an honest question. I quickly looked at the pricing for RHEL. It didn't seem outlandish. Can anyone comment on this?
- protomyth 6y ago
  Its really not especially compared to Microsoft or even IBM itself. My problem has been really crappy ability of Red Hat to answer any questions and the general friction of the purchase. They seem to have some company blindness about answering specific technical pre-sale questions with "I will have X call you." and that call never ever comes. So the next person calls you and you ask again and the cycle repeats. They are another company that likes you to go through partners and some of their partners aren't exactly quick about it.
- paul_f 6y ago
  It seems reasonable to me, I could sell management on the value of paying it. I would like to hear more from people with experience with Red Hat support.
k3oni 6y ago
Until they change their minds in a few months/years. I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything free at this point. RH isn't the company that it once was anymore. Edit: I'm sure this is not a popular opinion but it is what it is.
- dralley 6y ago
  >I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything open/free at this point. As a Red Hat employee for ~5 years, every line of code I've ever written professionally has been open source and licensed under the GPL. The same is generally true across the entire company (with the exception of contributions to external projects licensed Apache / MIT / BSD). Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"? You installed 16 systems and a half year later RH says, and in 1 year you have to pay for these or change to CentOS Stream, i think it's a very founded consideration after the CentOS debacle. But not sure what he means that RH does not care about Opensource...
    - k3oni 6y ago
      That was more a nod to the whole CentOS debacle and the way RH is doing business the last few years, plus this article relating to the free part. Not really related to opensource as i doubt they'll be able to escape that aspect, if they could they would have probably done that already as well.
      - nix23 6y ago
        To be honest it broke my heart a bit when they where sold to IBM. But hey there is SLES and in my opinion a much better option with the free tumbleweed, leap and the paid SLES and all the free services like OBS, openQA and Kiwi....and no i don't use BTRF...XFS all the way down ;) But if i have the freedom to choose the solution it nearly always choose is FreeBSD, one exception...OracleDB where i use OracleLinux.
naranha 6y ago
Hey, I like that I can play around with RHEL without too much of a hassle. Nevertheless for me that is not a replacement for what CentOS was: easy to deploy for small or personal projects without requiring registration/sign-up and you could leave it (mostly) alone for 10 years or so. Though for now I'm fairly happy with CentOS Stream, we'll see where it goes.
beck5 6y ago
As a bit of a self taught sysadmin who only touches Ubuntu/Debian based systems due there ubiquity, could someone explain the benefits of using RHEL?
- NDizzle 6y ago
  The main benefit for me was that systems I stood up in 2011 received security updates until last month.
- sound1 6y ago
  I am not a linux guy but had the same question and found out by googling a bit that it was because of software support. Major Linux vendors support only enterprise distros (like Redhat, CentOS and Suse)
- tw04 6y ago
  Enterprise support. Most enterprise hardware and software vendors don't have Ubuntu or Debian as a supported OS. Additionally the length of support, Ubuntu LTS gets close but RHEL will sell you support FOREVER.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    > Additionally the length of support, Ubuntu LTS gets close but RHEL will sell you support FOREVER. A question is whether that is truly positive. A long cycle means that each update becomes a project in itself disrupting whatever else you are doing. (After 10 years so many things changed everywhere, that you need to bring so many things together ...) With frequent updates it is part of the ongoing process. (And yes, there are cases for which one can make an argument)
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There's absolutely an argument that, for many companies, if you're dependent on a long-term stable release for everything (especially in the absence of actual paid support) you're probably doing it wrong.
- 6y ago
tw04 6y ago
I think they will come to regret this move in the long run. With Amazon signing up to sponsor rocky linux, it's only a matter of time before the user base moves there vs. dealing with all the headaches of "free" RHEL. Especially given that they won't make any commitments to long term availability beyond "we have no intent". https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-rhel-is-now-free-for-up-to-16-production-servers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-r... >We have no intent to end this program and we’ve set it up to be sustainable https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/
- kodah 6y ago
  16 servers in a data center is probably a medium sized business, if not a larger small business that does zero virtualization. 16 servers in the cloud that are rightly sized sounds incredibly small. I can't imagine this will sell many people much less attract former CentOS users. Given the fact that they've changed course so quickly on CentOS stream I can't imagine there's much good user faith to go around. To me, this was much bigger than just a shot in the foot.
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    i've got more than 16 "right-sized" VMs on the VMware cluster in my homelab. Between the other half-dozen physical servers, there's probably another 40+ "OS instances". Besides, I've had a RHEL developer account (which allowed me to register 16 hosts) for a few years now and it's been unused. Having to request it be renewed annually is a pain in the ass too.
broknbottle 6y ago
meh if you don't want to use centos stream then I would just switch to openSUSE Leap. Zypper is very similar to yum/dnf, so it's not like your switching to apt/apt-get or alpine apk and learning completely different package manager.
- type0 6y ago
  Thumbs up for OpenSUSE, RH should have taken an example from how closely SUSE operates with the community, sadly I think Red Hat is too big and too corporate to give a damn now.
  - strzibny 6y ago
    I wish OpenSUSE has more love, but it's important to realize some differences are still there. Namely: 1, OpenSUSE Leap cannot do full version upgrades 2, They use AppArmor instead of SELinux 3, Support is shorter than CentOS Stream[0] [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/how-long-will-be-centos-stream-supported/ https://nts.strzibny.name/how-long-will-be-centos-stream-sup...
- BossingAround 6y ago
  Is openSUSE Leap more stable than CentOS Stream?
  - nix23 6y ago
    I would say they are the same (LEAP and Centos (not stream)), you can change instantly to SLES if you need too. Leap15 = SLES15, Leap15.1 = SLES15sp1 and so on.
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  You can also use DNF on openSUSE: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:DNF https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:DNF
garbagecoder 6y ago
Yeah, I'm not running anything with some weird contingent license if I'm running Linux. Completely defeats the purpose. Also, now more than ever, after last month's big hacks I think building things from source makes more sense. I'll be sticking with gentoo for my mission-critical bare metal installs when I need Linux.
- symlinkk 6y ago
  I would not trust the community of volunteers that maintain Gentoo in their free time for anything mission critical. I would use Ubuntu or Red Hat, which are backed by companies.
  - nisa 6y ago
    I've got bad news for you - most of Ubuntu is repackaged Debian which is from a community of volunteers that maintains the packages. Besides that Ubuntu used to be sloppy in backporting important patches and doing some NIH here and there... not sure about Redhat but they source heavily from Fedora which is also community-based.
    - symlinkk 6y ago
      It doesn’t matter that Ubuntu packages originally came from Debian. At the end of the day, Canonical employees are being paid to make sure they are up to date. I trust that over a bunch of volunteers who do it out of the goodness of their heart.
    - akerl_ 6y ago
      I’m not sure I can agree with this concern. All Linux distros work by repackaging upstream code, the majority of which is written by volunteers. For Debian, they’re repackaging directly from upstream. Ubuntu repackages from Debian. The value of going through a company is that you can choose to write a check to Canonical or RedHat and say “I’m hitting this issue with the software you repackaged, here is money, fix the problem”. There’s no similarly direct pay-to-win for Fedora or Debian. You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party, which has an impact on the levers they can pull to resolve an issue.
jitendrac 6y ago
If a developer gets a hold of a RHEL copy[legally] regardless of its subscriptions terms, he have all the rights to re-distribute it due to the nature of GPL2 licensing, only thing is he cannot claim to be IP/copyright owner of redhat assets like logo.
- joshuaissac 6y ago
  Red Hat has provided free RHEL downloads and licences for development use through their developer programme for nearly five years now. They do require that you sign up for an account on their website. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-d...
symlinkk 6y ago
Cmon, drop the requirement to activate it with an account already, what year is this? No one is going to use this over Ubuntu, even if it is free, if there’s that extra step in there.
ArcMex 6y ago
Works for my current use case. Will still keep my eye on Rocky.
strzibny 6y ago
As a formal Red Hat packager, I am quite happy to see this change. Before I could not use RHEL to run my side project, but now I can! Also 16 is actually not a small number, people with Kubernetes orchestration sometimes forget how much you can run on a single machine :). I am even considering adding and marketing RHEL for my book[0] since the difference is just the registration. Speaking of which, if you use Vagrant, have a look at vagrant-registration. It can register your box automatically (I am the original author). [0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/ https://deploymentfromscratch.com/
hiram112 6y ago
I'd love to support RHEL financially, both on the server and on the development laptop. But I just don't trust that any of this extra cash flow they may see will go towards anything but 5% IBM dividends, obscene executive and sales salaries, with nothing left over for R&D and especially continued American jobs (IBM is basically an Indian company, now). I hope my large government customers ditch RHEL for something else - maybe a derivative that's home grown.
ogre_codes 6y ago
In other news, farmer Bob announces that he's closed the barn doors and asks all the cows which left to please come home.
kodah 6y ago
The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. Debian has existed for quite some time without any need for a corporation. Are there problems? Yes, but Debian isn't going to suddenly announce that it's going to kill itself either. I would suggest getting involved in the Debian community (without trying to take it over), and making meaningful contributions. If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations.
- erichocean 6y ago
  > The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. If you pay for software, like we do in VFX/Animation, then RHEL is basically the standard and what's supported best.
  - csdreamer7 6y ago
    Would you write out more about that? I would assume Windows is the standard for workstations.
    - alrs 6y ago
      Standard? Someone in vfx would have to answer that, but my understanding is: not really. There is a lot of vfx work that happens on Linux workstations. https://vfxplatform.com/about/ https://vfxplatform.com/about/
      - PowerBar 6y ago
        In the VFX environments I've seen (100+ artists), most artist workstations and servers are Linux (usually RHEL or CentOS due to much higher rpm than deb support in the industry). Macs are common for editors (who use the Adobe suite to make timelines for dailies) and producers (because shiny), while Windows is mainly used by admin staff (accounting, hr, etc) because they use the same terrible accounting software as every other company out there (note: this may be less so now with the move to web based solutions). While most hobby level video software is targeted at windows or Mac, the truly powerful stuff (houdini, maya, nuke, blender) are first class citizens on Linux. Currently one of the few artist programs that aren't available for Linux is the adobe suite which is mostly used by editors (for timelines) and photo editing (for promotional material) and most of that happens on Macs, usually in the editing department. Something to keep in mind is that many VFX shops are kind of specialized and will work on very specific portions of a movie or TV show. For example, the company that owns the final product (Disney, Fox, MGM, etc) will pay company A to shoot the movie, then company A will send the footage for a 30 second scene to company B to rotoscope everything, then it gets sent to company C for VFX elements, then to company D for 3d conversion, then to company E for lighting and finally to company F for audio and final stitching. This is repeated (often with different companies A-F) for each scene since different scenes required different levels of expertise in different areas such as crowd generation, fire simulation, raindrop removal (yes, it's as painful as it sounds), background replacement, CG helicopters, etc. Because of this, the few steps that require windows are typically handled by 1 or 2 companies so the rest only need enough Mac/Windows machines for their local editors to stick timelines together for daily reviews. An interesting side effect of the above is that almost every company you see in the credits of a movie had no idea what the dialog was because audio is one of the last things that gets added and completely bypasses 90% of the VFX houses involved.
passthejoe 6y ago
I bet 98% of the use cases for CentOS 8 can be more than adequately handled by CentOS Stream. And Rocky Linux (and probably a few other clones) are on the way.
Temasik 6y ago
just switch to oracle linux as saves the headache with a script (free forever with optional support subscription) https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/
blinkingled 6y ago
While they are at it if they can also stop the shitty practices of requiring support account to see content on access.redhat.com for solutions to known problems that'd be great. This mostly affects their paying customers so there's that.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Possibly the login wall works as a gateway drug for CentOS users to register RHN account (and hopefully they could sell RHEL)
StillBored 6y ago
Very bean counter thought process here: Yes, they covered home users, and probably decided to take the hit on the few tens of thousands of small businesses buying a $1k or so of subscriptions a year (and not via Dell/HP/etc). Which probably wasn't even a hit once they factored in the weight of having account managers, and the like looking at a tiny $1k a year deals. But it completely ignores the "build our product on centos" appliance market that existed. As well as a few others that might have shipped fairly significant volumes, but never wanted/needed support or did their own product+linux support as part of their general support channel. Yes, various hyperscalers were doing that and rebranding their own modified versions but that was more an error on the part of RHEL to fail to listen to those users anyway. Basically RH has consistently failed to understand that centos was the "OEM/toolkit" version of RHEL for a lot of pretty serious organizations.
- hajile 6y ago
  Given when this happened, I’d bet Red Hat knows, but IBM doesn’t care and just wants the extra revenue even if it costs them in the long run.
mroche 6y ago
It’s worth noting that this is only phase one of the program expansion. There are future announcements regarding academic institution licensing and research institution licensing (e.g. CERN).

175 points by IceWreck 6y ago

After their killing of CentOS, I hope anyone who reasonably can avoids RHEL. I'm positive they're going to change policies again in the future and fuck over people who decided to go with this zero monetary cost RHEL offering. > When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux. This is a load of bullshit. If that was their plan they would have announced both of these changes together. It's not like they were under time pressure to get the announcement out.

dralley 6y ago
>This is a load of bullshit. If that was their plan they would have announced both of these changes together. It's not like they were under time pressure to get the announcement out. I work for Red Hat, opinions are my own, etc. I don't know why they decided to announce the CentOS plans before announcing at least some of the expanded RHEL offerings, and many people are just as confused as myself. However, whatever the reason was, it's absolutely true that expanding access to no-cost and low-cost RHEL was always the plan, and the original announcement effectively stated as much.
freedomben 6y ago
You've obviously made the choice to hate, but for anyone else reading this comment, the CentOS announcement specifically mentioned at the time that an announcement like this was coming regarding expanded RHEL options. Not sure what more evidence is needed that it was the plan. If you're a conspiracy person go look at archive.org's version. If you believe archive.org is in on the conspiracy, well, I'm not sure what to tell you.
- syshum 6y ago
  Not the OP, and I have no doubt they had plans to "expand" RHEL options I also have no doubts they wanted to see how much bad PR the announcment made before figuring out that those expanded options where It was from be beginning a Monetary Grab, Redhat did a global scream test to see how much they would have to give away to take the screams down to a dull roar and stop the bleeding just enough to not lose any market share They have landed on 16 as the magic number for now, but like the OP I have visions of Darth Vader saying “I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.” while wearing a RedHat It does not fill me with confidence that I should make use of that 16 server license...
lalatendum 6y ago
RH was under time pressure to announce the CentOS 8 EOL dates. Because we did not want more people to move to CentOS 8 during the holidays. The programs weren't ready and we felt it was important to get the CentOS Linux announcement out as soon as possible. We had many long discussions about this in the Red Hat internal memolist when CentOS news were announced. Please search the internet for Red Hat's memolist. It takes a lot of time to come up with free programs like this, thats the simple truth. You can choose not to believe this and wait for few years to see how these turns out. It is not about immediate revenue growth but how to make RHEL evolve as the next generation OS. If RHEL does not change it will be become obsolete sooner or later.

bassman9000 6y ago

If still you need to login to access repos, same stuff.

choeger 6y ago

The production licenses for RHEL are certainly expensive, but it's not my job to decide whether they are worth it. My job is to develop and ship software to customers that used to run Ubuntu, CentOS, and sometimes RHEL. To compile/build/package that software we use docker containers, which provide nice isolation and hygiene and also guarantee user-space ABI compatibility to the target system. What I'd like to know: How can I user containers to develop for RHEL now? Is there some "short-lived" clause I could depend on or do I have to buy a license for every container I might want to spin up?

dralley 6y ago
Look into the RHEL Universal Base Image. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal... https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#introduction https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#introduction re: licensing, the FAQ says: Do I need a subscription to use UBI? No, the Red Hat Universal Base Images and all associated content can be used for development and deployment without the need for a Red Hat subscription. However, for a fully supported operational experience and access to an expanded list of non-UBI tools, containers built on UBI must be deployed on a Red Hat platform such as OpenShift or RHEL. Accessing non-UBI content does require a Red Hat subscription.
chasil 6y ago
Red Hat offers a "no support" server license for $350/year, which is the lowest licensing tier. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $800, and $1300. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-server https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser... Oracle has a larger range of tiers. The "no support" license is $120/year. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $500, $1200, $1400, and $2300. Oracle Linux can be used in production without a paid license of any kind; Red Hat Linux cannot be used in this way for large deployments (excepting the new 16-seat license for a developer account). Red Hat is aggressive with software audits; I have seen one. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ Both Oracle and Red Hat now have complete toolsets to convert support between an installed CentOS/RedHat/Oracle OS. Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL; previously a wipe and reinstall was required ("have fun reinstalling your system" is still on Oracle's CentOS site). The description looks much more thorough in replacing all possible packages with Red Hat versions: https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 Oracle does not replace CentOS or RedHat RPMs in their conversion (AFAIK), so it is much less violent on the platform changes. https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-to-oracle-linux https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-... Red Hat has terminated two major platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS. Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. The Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy. There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different.

chomp 6y ago

I appreciate the thought, but am still miffed at the "embrace, extend, extinguish" that caught me off guard here. I can't exactly pull out too many pitch forks because CentOS did let me enjoy some of their packaging labor for free. It's obvious in retrospect that their intention was to pull this when they acquired the CentOS project - plotting to turn CentOS into a RHEL on-ramp while dressing it as an embrace of the community feels like a kick in the groin. Also, 16 servers is barely enough for tech companies caught by this, and is less of a good will gesture, and more subscription growth hacking.

tux1968 6y ago

Honestly these seem like pretty generous and useful offerings. I appreciate the commitment they make to not use them as a sales channel as well. Will be interesting to see what else is offered in the coming February announcement.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
It's generous as long as you ignore the fact that CentOS used to cover all of these usecases without any restrictions on what you could use it for or how many servers you could use it on, for free, with no licensing or registration.
- tux1968 6y ago
  But since we aren't entitled to any free product at all, it seems unkind to criticize someone for not giving as much for free as they once did. It's still generous, even if previously it was more so.
  - runlevel1 6y ago
    We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based. That's the cost of building a product on GPL2 licensed software. The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. In killing its core mission, they haven't been. EDIT: Clarify sentence.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      > We are as entitled to it as we are to the Linux kernel on which it's based. Are you claiming they are in violation of the GPL license? I believe they still are 100% in compliance. > The CentOS project itself wasn't started by Red Hat. It was given to them with the expectation that they would be good stewards of it. They haven't. They stepped in to stewardship of the product quite naturally, with the full backing of the previous stewards. Nobody was forced into that agreement. It wasn't given to them as a gift, Red Hat has sponsored the project for the last 6+ years. The fact that you disagree with the direction it has since gone, does not mean it's wrong. It may be the difference between having something more modest, and having nothing at all. And if you want something closer to the original CentOS check out: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ Which was created by the CentOS founder.

awill 6y ago

First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. I have a single server in my home running CentOS 7. I gain nothing by using RHEL over Rocky in the future, except with RHEL I have to accept ToS, do some subscription checks, and run the risk that Red Hat cancels this programme down the road. I only see this of value for someone who actually runs real RHEL in prod, and needs to test/validate hardware/software. For anyone just wanting 'free' RHEL, they should just use Rocky.

dralley 6y ago
(RH Employee) > First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. I agree. >Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements.
- arbitrage 6y ago
  yeah, stop playing games, redhat? just say what you're going to say already. i have no idea why you're trying to focus so hard on building mindshare, building a mystery around it like you're a sarah mclachlan tribute band, but you already blew it. go back to what you're good at, please.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I understand as an RH employee you're likely not in a position to make decisions about what you can disclose when, but... (I'm sure you're aware) your first answer contradicts your second.
  - dralley 6y ago
    There's no contradiction, only an acknowledgement that (in my personal opinion) the piecemeal way these plans are being announced is understandably frustrating, but that they are legitimately serious about making RHEL easier to use across a spectrum of use cases (which the official post is pretty clear about).

zokier 6y ago

How about no-cost no-registration self-support RHEL for unlimited number of systems?

ognarb 6y ago
Someone need to pay for a service, not everything is free as in beer.
- merlinscholz 6y ago
  What would be the service on this case? Redhat already is open source and is being compiled anyways.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    So grab the source and compile it yourself. What RedHat provides is an enormous development effort and an extremely long lived LTS platform. That doesn't come for free. Many seem to want RHEL for free, but there are free alternatives. You can run: Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware, if the cost is such a huge issue. I won't argue that RedHat has handled the change to CentOS in a good way, they clearly haven't. On the other hand I don't free sorry for those companies how want all the benefits provided by RedHat, but not pay to keeping RedHat in business. Open source isn't about free, it's about giving you the option to make changes to the code yourself, or pay others to do it for you. RedHat would like to get paid for their work, if you don't want to do that, that's fine to, but then you need to do the work yourself.
    - zokier 6y ago
      There has been a freely downloadable Red Hat available for the past 20 years, either in the form of CentOS, or before it good old classic Red Hat Linux. That got them this far, where they are now. So you can understand how people feel bit miffed, especially now that they have Big Blue backing them they should be financially more stable than before.
      - 6y ago

isuckatcoding 6y ago

What is RHEL?

scarmig 6y ago
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For context, CentOS was a popular Linux distro that tracked RHEL, being mostly identical except for not requiring a support package. Red Hat stopped supporting it, which put a lot of its users in a bind. This is intended to replace it.
technofiend 6y ago
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL is a stable platform for businesses to run their apps on; they port upstream code fixes to their kernel and distribution and offer support for a price. Now that Centos and RHEL will no longer be in lockstep, some people are looking for alternatives. The upgrade from 1 RHEL license to 16 is a way for Red Hat to try and retain small projects and let home labbers and evangelists legally replace Centos rather than switch.

Cuuugi 6y ago

I'm thinking this news is related. https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-farewell-to-centos/ https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-... I'd still prefer CentOS lived, this is probably meant to keep people from grabbing pitchforks.

ehutch79 6y ago

I had to wade through a bunch of modals, and then the page kept jumping around... Doesn't engender a bunch of trust.

tpetry 6y ago

That is an interesting move. But with more and more organizations moving to dockerized services the real servers operating system is no longer that relevant. I do know that rhel provides free access to a subset of rhel packages for docker image building but so many packages are missing that you can‘t reslly use it. So next step for rhel, allowing dockerized rhel images would be nice. That is a real hurting point you created by your centos change!

dralley 6y ago
That's already a thing https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal...
- tpetry 6y ago
  And as i said the rhel images for docker and supported packages in the registry is very very limited, you will miss a lot of packages.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  As someone who started testing things with UBI images, I have found them to not be that great in terms of predicting how things behave installed under CentOS or RHEL. There are a lot of seemingly minor packaging differences that cause annoying issues when you go to deploy the same stuff on a real RHEL box.

tpetry 6y ago

How does rhel count these „up to 16 systems“? So if i am using 16 physical servers with at least two virtual vmware vms on each machine. Is that setup still 16 systems or do they count the number of virtual machines?

strzibny 6y ago
No, I think they count every virtual machine/container. Btw. I did not check, it's possible it's based on number of CPUs or smth.
- strzibny 6y ago
  Ok, I apologize, I wasn't sure about containers. It seems you don't count containers per se, but they have to run a base RHEL system.

strzibny 6y ago

I love this change. Will probably run things on RHEL now.

type0 6y ago
Why not CentOS Stream?
- strzibny 6y ago
  I will start with CentOS Stream, but might actually switch to RHEL later. I don't really have a good rationale hah, but I was working for Red Hat and it could be cool to finally run my side project on RHEL.

abfan1127 6y ago

As someone not running these small to medium sized businesses, this is an honest question. I quickly looked at the pricing for RHEL. It didn't seem outlandish. Can anyone comment on this?

protomyth 6y ago
Its really not especially compared to Microsoft or even IBM itself. My problem has been really crappy ability of Red Hat to answer any questions and the general friction of the purchase. They seem to have some company blindness about answering specific technical pre-sale questions with "I will have X call you." and that call never ever comes. So the next person calls you and you ask again and the cycle repeats. They are another company that likes you to go through partners and some of their partners aren't exactly quick about it.
paul_f 6y ago
It seems reasonable to me, I could sell management on the value of paying it. I would like to hear more from people with experience with Red Hat support.

k3oni 6y ago

Until they change their minds in a few months/years. I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything free at this point. RH isn't the company that it once was anymore. Edit: I'm sure this is not a popular opinion but it is what it is.

dralley 6y ago
>I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything open/free at this point. As a Red Hat employee for ~5 years, every line of code I've ever written professionally has been open source and licensed under the GPL. The same is generally true across the entire company (with the exception of contributions to external projects licensed Apache / MIT / BSD). Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nix23 6y ago
  >Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"? You installed 16 systems and a half year later RH says, and in 1 year you have to pay for these or change to CentOS Stream, i think it's a very founded consideration after the CentOS debacle. But not sure what he means that RH does not care about Opensource...
  - k3oni 6y ago
    That was more a nod to the whole CentOS debacle and the way RH is doing business the last few years, plus this article relating to the free part. Not really related to opensource as i doubt they'll be able to escape that aspect, if they could they would have probably done that already as well.
    - nix23 6y ago
      To be honest it broke my heart a bit when they where sold to IBM. But hey there is SLES and in my opinion a much better option with the free tumbleweed, leap and the paid SLES and all the free services like OBS, openQA and Kiwi....and no i don't use BTRF...XFS all the way down ;) But if i have the freedom to choose the solution it nearly always choose is FreeBSD, one exception...OracleDB where i use OracleLinux.

naranha 6y ago

Hey, I like that I can play around with RHEL without too much of a hassle. Nevertheless for me that is not a replacement for what CentOS was: easy to deploy for small or personal projects without requiring registration/sign-up and you could leave it (mostly) alone for 10 years or so. Though for now I'm fairly happy with CentOS Stream, we'll see where it goes.

beck5 6y ago

As a bit of a self taught sysadmin who only touches Ubuntu/Debian based systems due there ubiquity, could someone explain the benefits of using RHEL?

NDizzle 6y ago
The main benefit for me was that systems I stood up in 2011 received security updates until last month.
sound1 6y ago
I am not a linux guy but had the same question and found out by googling a bit that it was because of software support. Major Linux vendors support only enterprise distros (like Redhat, CentOS and Suse)
tw04 6y ago
Enterprise support. Most enterprise hardware and software vendors don't have Ubuntu or Debian as a supported OS. Additionally the length of support, Ubuntu LTS gets close but RHEL will sell you support FOREVER.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  > Additionally the length of support, Ubuntu LTS gets close but RHEL will sell you support FOREVER. A question is whether that is truly positive. A long cycle means that each update becomes a project in itself disrupting whatever else you are doing. (After 10 years so many things changed everywhere, that you need to bring so many things together ...) With frequent updates it is part of the ongoing process. (And yes, there are cases for which one can make an argument)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There's absolutely an argument that, for many companies, if you're dependent on a long-term stable release for everything (especially in the absence of actual paid support) you're probably doing it wrong.
6y ago

tw04 6y ago

I think they will come to regret this move in the long run. With Amazon signing up to sponsor rocky linux, it's only a matter of time before the user base moves there vs. dealing with all the headaches of "free" RHEL. Especially given that they won't make any commitments to long term availability beyond "we have no intent". https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-rhel-is-now-free-for-up-to-16-production-servers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-r... >We have no intent to end this program and we’ve set it up to be sustainable https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/

kodah 6y ago
16 servers in a data center is probably a medium sized business, if not a larger small business that does zero virtualization. 16 servers in the cloud that are rightly sized sounds incredibly small. I can't imagine this will sell many people much less attract former CentOS users. Given the fact that they've changed course so quickly on CentOS stream I can't imagine there's much good user faith to go around. To me, this was much bigger than just a shot in the foot.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  i've got more than 16 "right-sized" VMs on the VMware cluster in my homelab. Between the other half-dozen physical servers, there's probably another 40+ "OS instances". Besides, I've had a RHEL developer account (which allowed me to register 16 hosts) for a few years now and it's been unused. Having to request it be renewed annually is a pain in the ass too.

broknbottle 6y ago

meh if you don't want to use centos stream then I would just switch to openSUSE Leap. Zypper is very similar to yum/dnf, so it's not like your switching to apt/apt-get or alpine apk and learning completely different package manager.

type0 6y ago
Thumbs up for OpenSUSE, RH should have taken an example from how closely SUSE operates with the community, sadly I think Red Hat is too big and too corporate to give a damn now.
- strzibny 6y ago
  I wish OpenSUSE has more love, but it's important to realize some differences are still there. Namely: 1, OpenSUSE Leap cannot do full version upgrades 2, They use AppArmor instead of SELinux 3, Support is shorter than CentOS Stream[0] [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/how-long-will-be-centos-stream-supported/ https://nts.strzibny.name/how-long-will-be-centos-stream-sup...
BossingAround 6y ago
Is openSUSE Leap more stable than CentOS Stream?
- nix23 6y ago
  I would say they are the same (LEAP and Centos (not stream)), you can change instantly to SLES if you need too. Leap15 = SLES15, Leap15.1 = SLES15sp1 and so on.
Conan_Kudo 6y ago
You can also use DNF on openSUSE: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:DNF https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:DNF

garbagecoder 6y ago

Yeah, I'm not running anything with some weird contingent license if I'm running Linux. Completely defeats the purpose. Also, now more than ever, after last month's big hacks I think building things from source makes more sense. I'll be sticking with gentoo for my mission-critical bare metal installs when I need Linux.

symlinkk 6y ago
I would not trust the community of volunteers that maintain Gentoo in their free time for anything mission critical. I would use Ubuntu or Red Hat, which are backed by companies.
- nisa 6y ago
  I've got bad news for you - most of Ubuntu is repackaged Debian which is from a community of volunteers that maintains the packages. Besides that Ubuntu used to be sloppy in backporting important patches and doing some NIH here and there... not sure about Redhat but they source heavily from Fedora which is also community-based.
  - symlinkk 6y ago
    It doesn’t matter that Ubuntu packages originally came from Debian. At the end of the day, Canonical employees are being paid to make sure they are up to date. I trust that over a bunch of volunteers who do it out of the goodness of their heart.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    I’m not sure I can agree with this concern. All Linux distros work by repackaging upstream code, the majority of which is written by volunteers. For Debian, they’re repackaging directly from upstream. Ubuntu repackages from Debian. The value of going through a company is that you can choose to write a check to Canonical or RedHat and say “I’m hitting this issue with the software you repackaged, here is money, fix the problem”. There’s no similarly direct pay-to-win for Fedora or Debian. You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party, which has an impact on the levers they can pull to resolve an issue.

jitendrac 6y ago

If a developer gets a hold of a RHEL copy[legally] regardless of its subscriptions terms, he have all the rights to re-distribute it due to the nature of GPL2 licensing, only thing is he cannot claim to be IP/copyright owner of redhat assets like logo.

joshuaissac 6y ago
Red Hat has provided free RHEL downloads and licences for development use through their developer programme for nearly five years now. They do require that you sign up for an account on their website. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-d...

symlinkk 6y ago

Cmon, drop the requirement to activate it with an account already, what year is this? No one is going to use this over Ubuntu, even if it is free, if there’s that extra step in there.

ArcMex 6y ago

Works for my current use case. Will still keep my eye on Rocky.

strzibny 6y ago

As a formal Red Hat packager, I am quite happy to see this change. Before I could not use RHEL to run my side project, but now I can! Also 16 is actually not a small number, people with Kubernetes orchestration sometimes forget how much you can run on a single machine :). I am even considering adding and marketing RHEL for my book[0] since the difference is just the registration. Speaking of which, if you use Vagrant, have a look at vagrant-registration. It can register your box automatically (I am the original author). [0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/ https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

hiram112 6y ago

I'd love to support RHEL financially, both on the server and on the development laptop. But I just don't trust that any of this extra cash flow they may see will go towards anything but 5% IBM dividends, obscene executive and sales salaries, with nothing left over for R&D and especially continued American jobs (IBM is basically an Indian company, now). I hope my large government customers ditch RHEL for something else - maybe a derivative that's home grown.

ogre_codes 6y ago

In other news, farmer Bob announces that he's closed the barn doors and asks all the cows which left to please come home.

kodah 6y ago

The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. Debian has existed for quite some time without any need for a corporation. Are there problems? Yes, but Debian isn't going to suddenly announce that it's going to kill itself either. I would suggest getting involved in the Debian community (without trying to take it over), and making meaningful contributions. If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations.

erichocean 6y ago
> The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. If you pay for software, like we do in VFX/Animation, then RHEL is basically the standard and what's supported best.
- csdreamer7 6y ago
  Would you write out more about that? I would assume Windows is the standard for workstations.
  - alrs 6y ago
    Standard? Someone in vfx would have to answer that, but my understanding is: not really. There is a lot of vfx work that happens on Linux workstations. https://vfxplatform.com/about/ https://vfxplatform.com/about/
    - PowerBar 6y ago
      In the VFX environments I've seen (100+ artists), most artist workstations and servers are Linux (usually RHEL or CentOS due to much higher rpm than deb support in the industry). Macs are common for editors (who use the Adobe suite to make timelines for dailies) and producers (because shiny), while Windows is mainly used by admin staff (accounting, hr, etc) because they use the same terrible accounting software as every other company out there (note: this may be less so now with the move to web based solutions). While most hobby level video software is targeted at windows or Mac, the truly powerful stuff (houdini, maya, nuke, blender) are first class citizens on Linux. Currently one of the few artist programs that aren't available for Linux is the adobe suite which is mostly used by editors (for timelines) and photo editing (for promotional material) and most of that happens on Macs, usually in the editing department. Something to keep in mind is that many VFX shops are kind of specialized and will work on very specific portions of a movie or TV show. For example, the company that owns the final product (Disney, Fox, MGM, etc) will pay company A to shoot the movie, then company A will send the footage for a 30 second scene to company B to rotoscope everything, then it gets sent to company C for VFX elements, then to company D for 3d conversion, then to company E for lighting and finally to company F for audio and final stitching. This is repeated (often with different companies A-F) for each scene since different scenes required different levels of expertise in different areas such as crowd generation, fire simulation, raindrop removal (yes, it's as painful as it sounds), background replacement, CG helicopters, etc. Because of this, the few steps that require windows are typically handled by 1 or 2 companies so the rest only need enough Mac/Windows machines for their local editors to stick timelines together for daily reviews. An interesting side effect of the above is that almost every company you see in the credits of a movie had no idea what the dialog was because audio is one of the last things that gets added and completely bypasses 90% of the VFX houses involved.

passthejoe 6y ago

I bet 98% of the use cases for CentOS 8 can be more than adequately handled by CentOS Stream. And Rocky Linux (and probably a few other clones) are on the way.

Temasik 6y ago

just switch to oracle linux as saves the headache with a script (free forever with optional support subscription) https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/

blinkingled 6y ago

While they are at it if they can also stop the shitty practices of requiring support account to see content on access.redhat.com for solutions to known problems that'd be great. This mostly affects their paying customers so there's that.

fomine3 6y ago
Possibly the login wall works as a gateway drug for CentOS users to register RHN account (and hopefully they could sell RHEL)

StillBored 6y ago

Very bean counter thought process here: Yes, they covered home users, and probably decided to take the hit on the few tens of thousands of small businesses buying a $1k or so of subscriptions a year (and not via Dell/HP/etc). Which probably wasn't even a hit once they factored in the weight of having account managers, and the like looking at a tiny $1k a year deals. But it completely ignores the "build our product on centos" appliance market that existed. As well as a few others that might have shipped fairly significant volumes, but never wanted/needed support or did their own product+linux support as part of their general support channel. Yes, various hyperscalers were doing that and rebranding their own modified versions but that was more an error on the part of RHEL to fail to listen to those users anyway. Basically RH has consistently failed to understand that centos was the "OEM/toolkit" version of RHEL for a lot of pretty serious organizations.

hajile 6y ago
Given when this happened, I’d bet Red Hat knows, but IBM doesn’t care and just wants the extra revenue even if it costs them in the long run.

mroche 6y ago

It’s worth noting that this is only phase one of the program expansion. There are future announcements regarding academic institution licensing and research institution licensing (e.g. CERN).