4 ms·

This falls under the heading of "technically correct" - in the sense that the limit is high enough for people to make the argument you are, and yet too low for

This falls under the heading of "technically correct" - in the sense that the limit is high enough for people to make the argument you are, and yet too low for most enterprise use-cases. Worse, the offer could be withdrawn at any time.

Espionage724 3y ago
If you're enterprise with more than 16 machines, you can and should probably be paying for RHEL. What I'm not understanding is why people need to use RHEL and would resort to free random forks of it, instead of just using CentOS Stream or Fedora that are basically the same thing, actually from RH, and 100% free. RHEL is not that special.
- anyoneamous 3y ago
  > can and should probably be paying for RHEL. I'm on the fence about that. I wish people were more willing to financially support open-source development, but I've worked with dozens of customers using RHEL over the last 10 years and never seen a single one of them open a support request - on that basis I can see why people feel that the price is too high. When the options are "get gouged" or "be labelled a freeloader", the outcome is pretty obvious. > just using CentOS Stream or Fedora I think the rise of free alternatives (Amazon Linux) and a DevOps-style mindset (no patching, just burn it down and redeploy when updates are needed) are exactly what has motivated this squeeze - RHEL is losing relevance in a lot of places, so RH/IBM are left with fewer potential customers and so just end up squeezing them harder.
  - kiratp 3y ago
    “No support requests” was non-trivially due to RH’s efforts. Did those people thing that stable OSes just build themselves?
    - anyoneamous 3y ago
      Sure, and that's enough motivation for people to be convinced to pay something - I just think the current price is too high.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    You don't pay for the support requests, you pay for the work of letting you update to the next minor release at your own pace, having those updates be rock solid, and having security fixes even on older releases. In other words you pay for not having to open support requests.
    - anyoneamous 3y ago
      When a free alternative (CentOS, Rocky) exists, you can get those benefits without the cost. The only real differentiator RH has is support. Being an open source company means that RH has a non-standard business model and should expect non-standard profits. Their business model is inevitably doomed, but rather than innovating they are going with the "lock-in and gouge" model, exactly like Oracle.
      - bonzini 3y ago
        No, CentOS/Alma/Rocky only supports one minor release at a time (that's up to four major releases for a 10 year lifetime). You can stick to a major release but you have to update every 6 months or you'll skip the security updates too. Red Hat supports 15-ish release streams at this time between RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9. A lot of customers need that because validating a base system update takes months and they cannot afford not having security updates in the meanwhile.
        anyoneamous 3y ago
        The subtlety of different support levels for minor releases is something I hadn't come across before, thanks. I'm surprised RH haven't made more of that recently.
        bonzini 3y ago
        In fact the recent change basically consisted of going from 1 to 0 shipped stable branches (CentOS Stream is the mainline of RHEL). But most of those stable branches have never been public in the first place. In my opinion 99% of end users would be served well by CentOS Stream, but the strong marketing of bug-for-bug compatible distros on part of Rocky (and to be honest it's a fig leaf to pretend CIQ is not behind that) hampered the adoption of CentOS Stream and the users' perception of its stability.
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    Nothing in life is ever inevitable. Progress is never certain. No support requests usually means everything is working. No news means good news

Espionage724 3y ago

If you're enterprise with more than 16 machines, you can and should probably be paying for RHEL. What I'm not understanding is why people need to use RHEL and would resort to free random forks of it, instead of just using CentOS Stream or Fedora that are basically the same thing, actually from RH, and 100% free. RHEL is not that special.

anyoneamous 3y ago
> can and should probably be paying for RHEL. I'm on the fence about that. I wish people were more willing to financially support open-source development, but I've worked with dozens of customers using RHEL over the last 10 years and never seen a single one of them open a support request - on that basis I can see why people feel that the price is too high. When the options are "get gouged" or "be labelled a freeloader", the outcome is pretty obvious. > just using CentOS Stream or Fedora I think the rise of free alternatives (Amazon Linux) and a DevOps-style mindset (no patching, just burn it down and redeploy when updates are needed) are exactly what has motivated this squeeze - RHEL is losing relevance in a lot of places, so RH/IBM are left with fewer potential customers and so just end up squeezing them harder.
- kiratp 3y ago
  “No support requests” was non-trivially due to RH’s efforts. Did those people thing that stable OSes just build themselves?
  - anyoneamous 3y ago
    Sure, and that's enough motivation for people to be convinced to pay something - I just think the current price is too high.
- bonzini 3y ago
  You don't pay for the support requests, you pay for the work of letting you update to the next minor release at your own pace, having those updates be rock solid, and having security fixes even on older releases. In other words you pay for not having to open support requests.
  - anyoneamous 3y ago
    When a free alternative (CentOS, Rocky) exists, you can get those benefits without the cost. The only real differentiator RH has is support. Being an open source company means that RH has a non-standard business model and should expect non-standard profits. Their business model is inevitably doomed, but rather than innovating they are going with the "lock-in and gouge" model, exactly like Oracle.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      No, CentOS/Alma/Rocky only supports one minor release at a time (that's up to four major releases for a 10 year lifetime). You can stick to a major release but you have to update every 6 months or you'll skip the security updates too. Red Hat supports 15-ish release streams at this time between RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9. A lot of customers need that because validating a base system update takes months and they cannot afford not having security updates in the meanwhile.
      - anyoneamous 3y ago
        The subtlety of different support levels for minor releases is something I hadn't come across before, thanks. I'm surprised RH haven't made more of that recently.
        bonzini 3y ago
        In fact the recent change basically consisted of going from 1 to 0 shipped stable branches (CentOS Stream is the mainline of RHEL). But most of those stable branches have never been public in the first place. In my opinion 99% of end users would be served well by CentOS Stream, but the strong marketing of bug-for-bug compatible distros on part of Rocky (and to be honest it's a fig leaf to pretend CIQ is not behind that) hampered the adoption of CentOS Stream and the users' perception of its stability.
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  Nothing in life is ever inevitable. Progress is never certain. No support requests usually means everything is working. No news means good news