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I would like to add the perspective of a small-business infrastructure guy here. First things first: we're a Rocky Linux shop. About 100 instances, some bare m

I would like to add the perspective of a small-business infrastructure guy here. First things first: we're a Rocky Linux shop. About 100 instances, some bare metal, some VMs. A few local, a few at cloud providers like DigitalOcean. Held together by Ansible and kickstart installs. Too often the discussion about RHEL clones like Rocky paints a picture of people like me as freeloaders. And some of the folks with a similar setup might be. But most small-time Linux admins I know are real open-source believers. I would really like to funnel some money into the platform we're using. First and foremost because it's the right thing to do, the people writing all that source code deserve it. But also because we need platform continuity, and being able to open a support case from time to time would also be great. But it's really hard. I don't have the time and nerves to deal with the RHEL sales department, deal with the licensing, produce my own cloud images because DigitalOcean can't provide them, deal with our own internal purchasing process, deal with convincing my superiors that we need to. Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out.

_ea1k 3y ago
Honestly, there are a ton of people like you out there. A big selling point for Red Hat has always been their contributions to the community and that funding them would help to drive that. It is a big motivator for people transitioning from your state to becoming a customer.
Twirrim 3y ago
> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. Most of the major clouds have this pre-existing capability to charge more and revenue share the extra through their marketplace services etc; and they're in active use by other vendors. It's often a good source of revenue for both the cloud company and the vendor, and helps the customers by providing them with prebuild solutions that they don't have to build themselves (e.g. web application firewall vendors can/do provide closed source images that customers can use that way). It's not like this is expecting cloud companies to build whole new services from whole cloth just to support Red Hat.
dralley 3y ago
>Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. This 100% already exists, but I don't believe Digital Ocean is one of the supported vendors.
bayindirh 3y ago
You with 100 instances is pretty sizeable. On the other hand, I know research infrastructures (read: thousands of instances around Europe) built with CentOS 7, Alma & Rocky. These guys are also power users and developers who need no support. This is a massive blow by RedHat, and I'm not sure that they're aware of the size of the install base they are attacking to.
yrro 3y ago
> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. This exists, but probably only for the larger cloud providers and not e.g., DigitalOcean: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-GB/marketplace/apps/redhat.rhel-20190605?tab=Overvie https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-GB/marketplace/app...
kbenson 3y ago
We're the same, but a little larger. Don't let anyone convince you you're a freeloader. If you're a freeloader, then Red Hat are freeloaders for relying on the Linux Kernel and all the open source software in their distros as well. What we both are are power users that don't really need their support. Our company has an entitlement so we can use the KB articles (to our benefit) and view/submit bug reports to them (which is to their benefit). I have no problems telling them that (and for the most part did last week), and if someone on the call were to argue me on that point, I'd have happily gotten into it with them. I know they're adding a lot to linux and open source, and pay for a lot of developers to maintain and add to projects (including Linux itself), but that's just the point, they're adding to something that already exists that they use. They don't own it, and they can't expect to require payment for it. They aren't Microsoft, and the only reason they've ever been able to compete in that space is because they're standing on the shoulders of what the open source community has made possible. It's a symbiotic relationship, and they can mess with it at their peril.
- izacus 3y ago
  Did you really compare our freeloading shop against one of the biggest software contributors to Linux and supporting ecosystem? RH is a top 5 contributor of patches across the most important core components.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Red Hat adds to the open source projects, they didn't write them from scratch (in most cases). Using freely provided software and building your business on it is perfectly acceptable, whether it's us using Red Hat's sources or Red Hat using the Linux Kernel sources and hundreds to thousands of other open source projects. We extend the OS where it doesn't fit our needs, and submit patches and feedback and bugs to both Red Hat through a subscription for a system we have for just that purpose, as well as to the upstream projects RHEL is based on, just as Red Hat contributes to the upstream projects. So yes, I made that comparison. If you think a company using a RHEL derivative product is freeloading, I'm not sure how you can believe Red Hat isn't also freeloading on the open source community, but feel free to explain you position. I, for one, think neither is freeloading, but just making use of the open source community to provide extra value for ourselves and our customers.
jehb 3y ago
> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. I think they do this on AWS and Azure (and maybe GCE?). DO may just not see enough of their enterprise customers asking for it for them to dispatch the lawyers and negotiators to make this happen. Disclosure: Ex-Red Hatter, but never got anywhere close to anything related to sales or licensing.
- avhception 3y ago
  Thanks for the hint! I will keep it in mind. Still waiting for the situation to really calm down. We'd rather not spend precious time and effort on changing clouds, and even if we did we'd still need to figure out the situation regarding bare metal and container images.
  - progmetaldev 3y ago
    Most likely switching from DO to AWS or Azure is going to greatly increase your costs
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
>Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. We've tried to make deals with RH in the past, but they will only let us sell RHEL VMs with licenses if it's running on a RHEL hypervisor... which none of our platform is using at all.
- avhception 3y ago
  That's sad. And we'd have to figure out what to do with the bare metal instances and containers, too.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I think this sucks, but for a little bit of defense of RH on this the entire support stack is built around assuming a RHEL host (meaning you're using a supported and exact version of the hypervisor and associated tools). Adding support capabilities for a non-RHEL host would be a major task, and not one they are well equipped to do. Now that said it's a bit dumb because with most things it's not hard for support to tell your customer, "yep that's a problem in the guest" and help, or "that's a problem with the host, contact DO" or whoever. But in general, when Red Hat says something is "supported" they are guaranteeing a lot about it. They'll literally fix the code if something is wrong. There's also a culture internally of "be careful helping with something that is 'unsupported'" because customers have previously accused RH people of messing stuff up and demanding they fix it. I helped with stuff like that most of the time when I worked for RH, but I was always very clear with the customer that "this isn't Red Hat, this is me helping as a friend and fellow Linux nerd" and the rapport with the customers was always good enough that I wasn't worried.
  - progmetaldev 3y ago
    As someone who has done this, and benefitted from others doing this, I think the open sharing is probably the number one reason to use these types of solutions. You get people that are in their own niche and know specific parts of the system inside and out. That builds credibility and increased profits, but the companies are too nervous to stand behind their people.
jzb 3y ago
"Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing." This is a two-way street. It's not all on Red Hat. I don't know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn't tried to do a deal with Digital Ocean but it's not as simple as Red Hat just deciding to do it. There's a fair amount of certification work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the legal / business agreements. The "comparable" part exists with many cloud providers, so if you're not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription portability. However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces friction and for small shops that have a patchwork infrastructure as you describe, it's going to be difficult. Some of that is on Red Hat to solve if they want your money, but not all of it. They can't do it all themselves by fiat if Digital Ocean isn't willing to meet them halfway.
- avhception 3y ago
  We're not married to DigitalOcean, but changing cloud providers also takes time and investment we'd rather spend elsewhere. And we'd still have to figure out what to do with the bare metal instances, container images and whatnot. The friction is very real.
  - ikiris 3y ago
    you have to understand, why would digital ocean want to deal with this when they can use actual open source options without the overhead?
    - avhception 3y ago
      Because they might some day find themselves in a tight spot if all of those open source options have become a half-broken wasteland because nobody invests time/money.
      - ikiris 3y ago
        being afraid of all free linux distros going away because no one invests in open source is some epic level FUD. How exactly do you think those companies even came to exist again?
freedomben 3y ago
From your description, IMHO you're not a freeloader, especially since you want to contribute. You are the exact type of people that I think Red Hat is harming themselves with. I'm in basically the same boat, currently using Linode. At other companies I've made decisions to buy RHEL and OpenShift, and would again because I've been pretty happy (we'll see how this current thing shakes out). I also went to work for Red Hat (and took a pay and title cut) largely because I had so much love for them. I'd been using Fedora and CentOS (pre-stream) for many years. The expertise that I gained from the experience also let me hit the ground running in my new job, and I made them a lot of money. Had CentOS not existed, I would never have learned their ecosystem and certainly wouldn't have gone to work there. That's profit that is hard to measure, and it is hard to directly tie it to somebody's commission or KPIs, but I'm sure it's not unsubstantial. Many of the people I worked with had a similar backstory! I would also say (at least when I worked there) I didn't know anybody (who wasn't a sales person) who would have called us free loaders. Quite the opposite, they considered us part of the community.
- avhception 3y ago
  This is essentially my backstory as well. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad running Fedora. RedHat seems to be focused on big corp and government customers. But even they are not an island. Loosing the grassroots will really hurt them in the long term I think.

_ea1k 3y ago

Honestly, there are a ton of people like you out there. A big selling point for Red Hat has always been their contributions to the community and that funding them would help to drive that. It is a big motivator for people transitioning from your state to becoming a customer.

Twirrim 3y ago

> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. Most of the major clouds have this pre-existing capability to charge more and revenue share the extra through their marketplace services etc; and they're in active use by other vendors. It's often a good source of revenue for both the cloud company and the vendor, and helps the customers by providing them with prebuild solutions that they don't have to build themselves (e.g. web application firewall vendors can/do provide closed source images that customers can use that way). It's not like this is expecting cloud companies to build whole new services from whole cloth just to support Red Hat.

dralley 3y ago

bayindirh 3y ago

You with 100 instances is pretty sizeable. On the other hand, I know research infrastructures (read: thousands of instances around Europe) built with CentOS 7, Alma & Rocky. These guys are also power users and developers who need no support. This is a massive blow by RedHat, and I'm not sure that they're aware of the size of the install base they are attacking to.

yrro 3y ago

> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. This exists, but probably only for the larger cloud providers and not e.g., DigitalOcean: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-GB/marketplace/apps/redhat.rhel-20190605?tab=Overvie https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-GB/marketplace/app...

kbenson 3y ago

We're the same, but a little larger. Don't let anyone convince you you're a freeloader. If you're a freeloader, then Red Hat are freeloaders for relying on the Linux Kernel and all the open source software in their distros as well. What we both are are power users that don't really need their support. Our company has an entitlement so we can use the KB articles (to our benefit) and view/submit bug reports to them (which is to their benefit). I have no problems telling them that (and for the most part did last week), and if someone on the call were to argue me on that point, I'd have happily gotten into it with them. I know they're adding a lot to linux and open source, and pay for a lot of developers to maintain and add to projects (including Linux itself), but that's just the point, they're adding to something that already exists that they use. They don't own it, and they can't expect to require payment for it. They aren't Microsoft, and the only reason they've ever been able to compete in that space is because they're standing on the shoulders of what the open source community has made possible. It's a symbiotic relationship, and they can mess with it at their peril.

izacus 3y ago
Did you really compare our freeloading shop against one of the biggest software contributors to Linux and supporting ecosystem? RH is a top 5 contributor of patches across the most important core components.
- kbenson 3y ago
  Red Hat adds to the open source projects, they didn't write them from scratch (in most cases). Using freely provided software and building your business on it is perfectly acceptable, whether it's us using Red Hat's sources or Red Hat using the Linux Kernel sources and hundreds to thousands of other open source projects. We extend the OS where it doesn't fit our needs, and submit patches and feedback and bugs to both Red Hat through a subscription for a system we have for just that purpose, as well as to the upstream projects RHEL is based on, just as Red Hat contributes to the upstream projects. So yes, I made that comparison. If you think a company using a RHEL derivative product is freeloading, I'm not sure how you can believe Red Hat isn't also freeloading on the open source community, but feel free to explain you position. I, for one, think neither is freeloading, but just making use of the open source community to provide extra value for ourselves and our customers.

jehb 3y ago

> Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. I think they do this on AWS and Azure (and maybe GCE?). DO may just not see enough of their enterprise customers asking for it for them to dispatch the lawyers and negotiators to make this happen. Disclosure: Ex-Red Hatter, but never got anywhere close to anything related to sales or licensing.

avhception 3y ago
Thanks for the hint! I will keep it in mind. Still waiting for the situation to really calm down. We'd rather not spend precious time and effort on changing clouds, and even if we did we'd still need to figure out the situation regarding bare metal and container images.
- progmetaldev 3y ago
  Most likely switching from DO to AWS or Azure is going to greatly increase your costs

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago

>Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out. We've tried to make deals with RH in the past, but they will only let us sell RHEL VMs with licenses if it's running on a RHEL hypervisor... which none of our platform is using at all.

avhception 3y ago
That's sad. And we'd have to figure out what to do with the bare metal instances and containers, too.
freedomben 3y ago
I think this sucks, but for a little bit of defense of RH on this the entire support stack is built around assuming a RHEL host (meaning you're using a supported and exact version of the hypervisor and associated tools). Adding support capabilities for a non-RHEL host would be a major task, and not one they are well equipped to do. Now that said it's a bit dumb because with most things it's not hard for support to tell your customer, "yep that's a problem in the guest" and help, or "that's a problem with the host, contact DO" or whoever. But in general, when Red Hat says something is "supported" they are guaranteeing a lot about it. They'll literally fix the code if something is wrong. There's also a culture internally of "be careful helping with something that is 'unsupported'" because customers have previously accused RH people of messing stuff up and demanding they fix it. I helped with stuff like that most of the time when I worked for RH, but I was always very clear with the customer that "this isn't Red Hat, this is me helping as a friend and fellow Linux nerd" and the rapport with the customers was always good enough that I wasn't worried.
- progmetaldev 3y ago
  As someone who has done this, and benefitted from others doing this, I think the open sharing is probably the number one reason to use these types of solutions. You get people that are in their own niche and know specific parts of the system inside and out. That builds credibility and increased profits, but the companies are too nervous to stand behind their people.

jzb 3y ago

"Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing." This is a two-way street. It's not all on Red Hat. I don't know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn't tried to do a deal with Digital Ocean but it's not as simple as Red Hat just deciding to do it. There's a fair amount of certification work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the legal / business agreements. The "comparable" part exists with many cloud providers, so if you're not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription portability. However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces friction and for small shops that have a patchwork infrastructure as you describe, it's going to be difficult. Some of that is on Red Hat to solve if they want your money, but not all of it. They can't do it all themselves by fiat if Digital Ocean isn't willing to meet them halfway.

avhception 3y ago
We're not married to DigitalOcean, but changing cloud providers also takes time and investment we'd rather spend elsewhere. And we'd still have to figure out what to do with the bare metal instances, container images and whatnot. The friction is very real.
- ikiris 3y ago
  you have to understand, why would digital ocean want to deal with this when they can use actual open source options without the overhead?
  - avhception 3y ago
    Because they might some day find themselves in a tight spot if all of those open source options have become a half-broken wasteland because nobody invests time/money.
    - ikiris 3y ago
      being afraid of all free linux distros going away because no one invests in open source is some epic level FUD. How exactly do you think those companies even came to exist again?

freedomben 3y ago

From your description, IMHO you're not a freeloader, especially since you want to contribute. You are the exact type of people that I think Red Hat is harming themselves with. I'm in basically the same boat, currently using Linode. At other companies I've made decisions to buy RHEL and OpenShift, and would again because I've been pretty happy (we'll see how this current thing shakes out). I also went to work for Red Hat (and took a pay and title cut) largely because I had so much love for them. I'd been using Fedora and CentOS (pre-stream) for many years. The expertise that I gained from the experience also let me hit the ground running in my new job, and I made them a lot of money. Had CentOS not existed, I would never have learned their ecosystem and certainly wouldn't have gone to work there. That's profit that is hard to measure, and it is hard to directly tie it to somebody's commission or KPIs, but I'm sure it's not unsubstantial. Many of the people I worked with had a similar backstory! I would also say (at least when I worked there) I didn't know anybody (who wasn't a sales person) who would have called us free loaders. Quite the opposite, they considered us part of the community.

avhception 3y ago
This is essentially my backstory as well. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad running Fedora. RedHat seems to be focused on big corp and government customers. But even they are not an island. Loosing the grassroots will really hurt them in the long term I think.