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> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about One guy? The sentiment of

> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about One guy? The sentiment of CentOS users being freeloaders is shared by a lot of people, inside and outside of IBM. I remember when the original announcement came out that CentOS was being killed in favour of CentOS Stream. Lots of IBM (Red Hat) employees were defending the change by painting CentOS users as getting a paid product for free. Lots of people here on Hacker News and Reddit and other places were defending it as well. Don't try to rewrite history.

tcmart14 3y ago
The sad part is the short nearsightedness. I know tons of RHEL engineers who only got into RHEL because they could essentially learn large parts of RHEL for free on CentOS and then go on to work professionally on RHEL. I also understand that a lot of courses to become official RHEL engineers/sysadmins use CentOS for the classes.
- hhhfgshanda828 3y ago
  This is not true. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently available at no charge to students and non-commercial users for the use cases you mentioned. And it has always been available in that manner. It even comes with additional (paid if used commercially) red hat products on top of the OS itself. I have a tough time believing they didn't know that considering red hat basically advertises training on the free version of RHEL. They want you to pay to take the RHCSA, which costs much more than anybody would realistically spend on a personal OS for learning. https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux#general https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
  - freedomben 3y ago
    The "free" RHEL licenses still require dicking around with subscription manager, and creating/maintaining a Red Hat account. It may not be much overhead if you already have paid RHEL instances, but for somebody who doesn't it's a stumbling block. I think it's great that Red Hat offers free dev subs and I applaud that, but I think they underestimate the friction that creates.

tcmart14 3y ago

The sad part is the short nearsightedness. I know tons of RHEL engineers who only got into RHEL because they could essentially learn large parts of RHEL for free on CentOS and then go on to work professionally on RHEL. I also understand that a lot of courses to become official RHEL engineers/sysadmins use CentOS for the classes.

hhhfgshanda828 3y ago
This is not true. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently available at no charge to students and non-commercial users for the use cases you mentioned. And it has always been available in that manner. It even comes with additional (paid if used commercially) red hat products on top of the OS itself. I have a tough time believing they didn't know that considering red hat basically advertises training on the free version of RHEL. They want you to pay to take the RHCSA, which costs much more than anybody would realistically spend on a personal OS for learning. https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux#general https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
- freedomben 3y ago
  The "free" RHEL licenses still require dicking around with subscription manager, and creating/maintaining a Red Hat account. It may not be much overhead if you already have paid RHEL instances, but for somebody who doesn't it's a stumbling block. I think it's great that Red Hat offers free dev subs and I applaud that, but I think they underestimate the friction that creates.