Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)
- Reference: 1708453874
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/02/20/red_hat_rhel_reasons/
- Source link:
The company's post comes as the countdown to the end of life for CentOS 7 becomes ever more difficult for administrators to ignore. At the end of June 2024, maintenance updates for the venerable operating system will cease, and unless the admins turn to a third party for further updates, a migration to an alternative must happen.
The impending [1]demise of CentOS has not come as a surprise. In 2020, Red Hat [2]announced that the CentOS project – a non-commercial Linux distribution that tracked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) – would become CentOS Stream and follow a development branch of RHEL. It would thus be less than useful as something to host production workloads.
[3]
The decision spawned distributions, including [4]Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, both of which aimed for RHEL compatibility. Red Hat then [5]changed the terms under which the code for RHEL would be made available, making only CentOS Stream source available to all, which was shortly followed by the [6]formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) by SUSE, CIQ, and Oracle among others, and the frankly surreal sight of [7]Oracle riding to the rescue of open source .
[8]
[9]
No, you really couldn't make it up.
We were, therefore, keen to learn what Red Hat thought were the [10]top five reasons to convert from CentOS to RHEL. Other than ensuring IBM's bottom line is kept healthy, of course.
[11]Red Hat greases migration to RHEL for CentOS 7 holdouts
[12]Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org
[13]OpenELA flips Red Hat the bird with public release of Enterprise Linux source
[14]Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines
However, it appears that we weren't alone in wondering what would make a CentOS user opt for a RHEL subscription. All this morning, Red Hat's site only served up: "We'll be back soon. Thank you for your patience."
[15]
Red Hat "We'll be back soon" screen
We notified Red Hat of the problem and were told it was a "minor cache issue," and all was eventually made well. The company's reasons to move include access to its Insights platform and expert knowledge, a decade of updates, training and certification, and reliability.
While worthy, we're not sure all represent excellent reasons. AlmaLinux, for example, [16]will keep the support lights on for ten years , and CentOS users will be well used to using the community for "expert knowledge." ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?t=79705
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZdUvGRmsAApIVysfyA81uQAAAYc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/14/oracle_suse_ciq_openela/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZdUvGRmsAApIVysfyA81uQAAAYc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZdUvGRmsAApIVysfyA81uQAAAYc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/5-reasons-convert-centos-linux-rhel
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/rhel_insights_conversion_tool/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/29/rhel_10_dropping_x11/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/03/openela_enterprise_linux_source/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/11/red_hat_closed_rhsa_announce/
[15] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/02/20/red_hat_patience.jpg
[16] https://endoflife.date/almalinux
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: After almost 30 years ...
Indeed, I already moved the servers to Debian(stable) some time ago. Haven't looked back and running smoothly. Next will be to move the last of an older Ubuntu install to Debian too because of their intrusive messages.
Hardest to let go of will be my Fedora machine that has gone from FC1 all the way to F38 (with hardware upgrades along the way).
Re: After almost 30 years ...
For me it's not as much about Red Hat's (mis-)handling of source code access, though it seems like a silly and unnecessary own-goal to me.
More generally it's Red Hat's business and product decisions that bother me. E.g. I'm still wary of Red Hat for the way they pulled the rug out on EL8 support lifetime as a consequence of "Stream" introduction. If they're willing to renege on their own announced support commitments, then how can you really trust anything they say.
The timing of it was just awful, enough that you almost wonder if it wasn't intentional. Had they announced CentOS Stream and the corresponding CentOS 8 EOL before EL8 deployments really had a chance to get going, it might have been more understandable. Or had they simply honored the previous schedule and let the natural CentOS 8 EOL timeline play out alongside CentOS Stream instead of cutting it short, the outcry would likely have been less severe. Give the people deploying CentOS the time they'd been promised, so they can evaluate and decide their path forward, basically.
Their dubious attempts to smooth over and double-talk their way through/around those mis-steps hardly inspired trust and confidence either. And frankly, if you don't trust your vendor, or have confidence that they can help you even if they want to, then it's probably time to look elsewhere.
CERN
I wonder if CERN will step up and continue to provide updates for Centos 7. They kind of did, for Centos 6 ..
You only need 3 letters to want to move from RedHat to literally anything else:
IBM.
Their businesses practices are beginning to show through the cracks at RedHat.
[Recent SUSE employee here... and Fedora user]
You did look at Liberty Linux, for those systems that need patches/support/to be compliant?
No migration needed, just an extra repo (given you don't have a hard requirement to have your own local repo, which might be supported, I'm checking internally)
Ok, I'll get my coat now
Punishing potential / future customers is terrible business.
Some imbeciles at IBM Red Hat believed they could squeeze CentOS users into RHEL customers by essentially crippling CentOS. The problem is that few of these organizations are going to pay for RHEL. I've used both products; and I generally only specify RHEL if formal support is needed for compliance issues or if somebody running the server is going to need that level of hand-holding (we try to avoid this, but it's not always possible). But for the most part, our in-house troubleshooting abilities exceed Red Hat's support team and it's difficult to rationalize paying for support contracts that we never use.
This has always been a significant aspect of the open source business model. Not everyone is going to pay, especially for Linux where it's not like it's an actual product of Red Hat. They do some development, they bundle things into a nice distro, and they get some paid support business. I have no problem with other business models, including freemium ones like FreePBX where I've bought a lot of add-ons and have no problem doing so. I've bought quite a bit of OpenBSD merch to support their projects like OpenSSH, and I could go on and on with examples (back to the days of registering shareware). The point isn't to talk myself up, but to explain why IBM / RedHat have lost me as a customer, forever. People like me are their "marginal customers:" the ones they risk gaining or losing. We made substantial investments based on Red Hat's very public commitments of support for CentOS. They're free to change their minds, but in doing so they harmed our investments. Therefore, they've moved from "maybe get paid" to "never get paid."
Based on comments from when this happened, I don't think I'm alone in my thinking.
Oracle adds another six months to CentOS 7
With the proviso "Expect no new version/functionality upgrades, only critical and security related fixes," Oracle will provide another six months of critical RPMs.
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/elsp-lifetime-069338.pdf
Adapting this might be as simple as adding additional yum repositories.
Login required for this link:
https://community.oracle.com/mosc/discussion/4546696/announcement-oracle-linux-7-premier-support-extended-from-jul-2024-to-dec-2024
After almost 30 years ...
of using Red Hat or Centos I am moving my servers to Debian.
Why ? I cannot stomach the way that red hat takes open source code and stops others from distributing it.