To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production
- Reference: 1611173047
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/20/red_hat_amends_developer_license/
- Source link:
CentOS Linux is a community build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and therefore suitable for production use. CentOS Stream, which will remain available, is a preview build of what is likely to be in RHEL – great for testing but not ideal for production use.
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The popularity of CentOS, which drives 17.7 per cent of Linux-based web sites, [3]according to W3Techs , has meant a strong response to Red Hat's decision, including alternative free builds such as [4]Rocky Linux and [5]Project Lenix , which is now known as Alma Linux.
Red Hat said in December that it would work to plug the gap left by CentOS with new ways to license RHEL and today's [6]statement is said to be "the first of many new programs."
[7]
Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads' [8]READ MORE
The big change is that the free developer subscription "can be used in production for up to 16 systems". This represents a major change to the current developer programme, which [9]states that "the no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription is only for development purposes and may not be used in production."
The wording of the new terms is not yet available, however. "The T&C’s won’t be available to view until the program launch on February 1st," a spokesperson for Red Hat told The Reg .
Red Hat said that it "isn't a sales program" and that this updated subscription will be available "no later than February 1, 2021". A second change is that development teams will now be able to join the developer programme, as opposed to individual developers only. Under the new terms, developer subscriptions will also be eligible for Red Hat Cloud Access, which enables deployment to public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, though presumably without the support that Cloud Access currently includes.
Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. "16 servers is actually reasonable IMO, as much as I hate Red Hat and how they're running things, 16 systems isn't all that bad for people who run small business infra," said one user on the Rocky Linux [10]community chat . Others felt that 16 systems is too restrictive.
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The key change is that whereas CentOS Linux came without any such limitations, the new RHEL terms are designed to ensure that large-scale users have to pay, reinforcing the notion that it was commercial interest that drove the original decision. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x250&tile=2&c=2YAi2C@ewZPT0lWB7qL5raAAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/15/centos_alternatives/
[6] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x250%7C300x252%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33YAi2C@ewZPT0lWB7qL5raAAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/22/red_hat_defends_its_centos/
[9] https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux#general
[10] https://chat.rockylinux.org/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251&tile=4&c=44YAi2C@ewZPT0lWB7qL5raAAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The trust is gone and it's not coming back.
Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Announcing LTS for CentOS was a huge commitment that influenced a lot of behavior (including ours). To back out on it creates a significant reputation hit, but one that could have been managed if done in a halfway intelligent manner. To back out without notice for organizations to change their behavior is the reputational equivalent of dropping a thermonuclear bomb on themselves. It's complete annihilation. There is no coming back from this. RHEL is dead to us, because they have rendered their commitments have been rendered meaningless.
Who guarantees...
... someone who changes their 16 CentOS production servers to 16 developer-subscription based RHEL servers that, two years ahead, Red Hat won't suddenly cut the number of allowed servers down to, say, 8, starting to demand fees for the others?
Just asking...
Seems to me that this sort of thing is inevitable in teh open source world, and where you have many distributions of teh same thing, when something become popular someone else sees a way to make money from it.
I see a lot of CentOS instances in appliances, so there are a lot of big companies enjoying a freebie that now have to expend a lot of time and effort moving to a new distrbution, they may like to expend some effort in making their code easier to move between distributions as this is only likely to happen more regualrly as distro come and go or are acquired.
Whats the betting ??
CentOS - Free download, no login necessary, install, get on with life.
RHEL - Register, Get accepted, Permit to download via private link,
Customer database updated.
Constant marketing pushes to see if you would like to "upgrade"
I bet this changes at some point in the future too, once all the noise has quietened down again.
It will be a no from me then...