23 ms·

RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them. If R

RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them. If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.

gnukid 3y ago
Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?
- mikelward 3y ago
  Or Fedora.
  - hdaz0017 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - RichardCA 3y ago
    Last time I tried Fedora was FC35. I came back a few months later and tried to build a kernel module, I couldn't get the RPM's for kernel-devel and kernel-headers to line up correctly. It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
- hdaz0017 3y ago
  [flagged]
- exibmer 3y ago
  CentOS stream isn't stable, it's a rolling distro. That's like asking "why can't people running RHEL go to Arch Linux or OpenSuSE TumbleWeed?"
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Oh come on, the idea that CentOS stream is on par with arch, tumbleweed, and fedora is ludicrous. Either you don't understand what CentOS stream is, or you're being ridiculously hyperbolic.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      From an infrastructure operator's point of view, there's no practical difference.
orf 3y ago
Do everyday people need an enterprise Linux distro? Why not use one of their other everyday-people focused distributions?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rektide 3y ago
  Valid notion. I don't really know the impact to top of funnel, but it seems like such a gamble to me to tighten the pipeline so much, exclude so many from starting. It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).
- awill 3y ago
  Speaking for myself, I have a home server. I bought it almost 9 years ago, and the server (haswell-grade xeon) is still perfectly ok for home-server stuff, like a NAS and plex. When I set up the server, I picked CentOS 7 because I wanted a simple, boring OS that got updates for a long time. Sure, I could have used Debian or Ubuntu, and done an OS upgrade every 3-5 years, but I just wanted to avoid it. Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.
jacooper 3y ago
If you've read the article, its clearly stated that many more people were just using CentOS as free RHEL, never needing to pay anything because it gives them everything they need for free. It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.
- prepend 3y ago
  > It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything. It used to be worth it for 20+ years. Now something changed. For my servers I used to use 95% centos, 5% rhel. Now I’ll use 0% rhel. I didn’t need support for most servers but I liked having comparability for when things grew into needing it.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    Have you considered the developer team license, the UBI, CentOS Stream? If none of them work for you, either there is a hole that Red Hat would like to be closed or you were already violating the support agreement.
    - apple4ever 3y ago
      Probably the reason is licensing is a pain, and its not true "zero-cost" in that case. CentOS then Rocky/Alma removed that issue. RH doesn't understand this.

gnukid 3y ago

Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?

mikelward 3y ago
Or Fedora.
- hdaz0017 3y ago
  [flagged]
- RichardCA 3y ago
  Last time I tried Fedora was FC35. I came back a few months later and tried to build a kernel module, I couldn't get the RPM's for kernel-devel and kernel-headers to line up correctly. It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
hdaz0017 3y ago
[flagged]
exibmer 3y ago
CentOS stream isn't stable, it's a rolling distro. That's like asking "why can't people running RHEL go to Arch Linux or OpenSuSE TumbleWeed?"
- freedomben 3y ago
  Oh come on, the idea that CentOS stream is on par with arch, tumbleweed, and fedora is ludicrous. Either you don't understand what CentOS stream is, or you're being ridiculously hyperbolic.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    From an infrastructure operator's point of view, there's no practical difference.

orf 3y ago

Do everyday people need an enterprise Linux distro? Why not use one of their other everyday-people focused distributions?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rektide 3y ago
Valid notion. I don't really know the impact to top of funnel, but it seems like such a gamble to me to tighten the pipeline so much, exclude so many from starting. It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).
awill 3y ago
Speaking for myself, I have a home server. I bought it almost 9 years ago, and the server (haswell-grade xeon) is still perfectly ok for home-server stuff, like a NAS and plex. When I set up the server, I picked CentOS 7 because I wanted a simple, boring OS that got updates for a long time. Sure, I could have used Debian or Ubuntu, and done an OS upgrade every 3-5 years, but I just wanted to avoid it. Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.

jacooper 3y ago

If you've read the article, its clearly stated that many more people were just using CentOS as free RHEL, never needing to pay anything because it gives them everything they need for free. It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.

prepend 3y ago
> It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything. It used to be worth it for 20+ years. Now something changed. For my servers I used to use 95% centos, 5% rhel. Now I’ll use 0% rhel. I didn’t need support for most servers but I liked having comparability for when things grew into needing it.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Have you considered the developer team license, the UBI, CentOS Stream? If none of them work for you, either there is a hole that Red Hat would like to be closed or you were already violating the support agreement.
  - apple4ever 3y ago
    Probably the reason is licensing is a pain, and its not true "zero-cost" in that case. CentOS then Rocky/Alma removed that issue. RH doesn't understand this.