Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 21, 2023 18:03 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867)
In reply to: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability by amacater
Parent article: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

What promises has Red Hat broken here? I'm genuinely curious. Can you point to specifics?

"They weren't representing themselves as RHEL." I believe Rocky uses the phrase "bug-for-bug compatible" with RHEL. So, technically, not saying "this is RHEL" but walking as close to that line as possible.

"For third parties developing for deployment on RHEL - maybe run, don't walk, from RHEL development - you'll now have to rely on each of your customers paying for Red Hat Enterprise Linux support and maintaining their subscription."

So here's a thought. Maybe they should be paying for RHEL support? What vendors want is a platform they can target that they can depend on. The development and maintenance of such a thing doesn't come cheap. If Debian, for instance, is good enough - great. Target Debian, tell your customers to use Debian, and they can save the RHEL subscription money for whatever.

But. If it actually has value and the complaint is "I can't get that platform for free anymore," where the platform sits under an application you're paying a vendor for, maybe you (or the vendor) need to be paying for it.

The thing that everybody is really panicking about is the loss of a free RHEL. Think about why that is. Because it does have value and they know the alternatives don't provide what they really want.

If you are using a RHEL clone in non-production situations they have no-cost subscriptions and/or the CentOS Stream model should be sufficient if what you want is a RHEL-alike that doesn't have to be "bug for bug" compatible. If you absolutely have to have "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL, I'll say again: Then you probably ought to be paying for it.

(Disclaimer: I am a former Red Hat employee.)

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 23, 2023 8:00 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you are using a RHEL clone in non-production situations they have no-cost subscriptions

But what I want as someone who already thinks supporting the ancient versions RHEL uses is a huge pain is to avoid the additional pain of licenses, not paying for licenses, the whole license nonsense itself. I want to make some Docker build image or test server without having to worry about making a RedHat account and signing up for some free license, connecting the system to the license server,... even if RedHat thinks that is the way my use-case should be covered "for free".

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 23, 2023 16:02 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

"But what I want"

Is irrelevant, really. I mean, you're entitled to want whatever you want, but Red Hat as a business is not obliged to make it possible. They've come a long way from the early CentOS days to try to meet the needs of people who don't match their customer profile. If signing up for a subscription and dealing with subscription processes is still too much trouble for you, then there's plenty of other Linux distros that are really good for most use cases.

But if you want or need "bug-for-bug" compatibility with RHEL -- if CentOS Stream and their Red Hat Universal Base Image aren't close enough for your needs -- either meet them where they are or don't use RHEL.

I get that Red Hat's subscription process adds friction. I use their no-cost developer subscription myself for a workstation and server. It adds a little bit of time for me to sign into their web-based system and generate images that are already subscribed. But it's necessary because I want to use RHEL for a workstation for work and my $dayjob has a software requirement that depends on either a specific version of RHEL or Ubuntu, and of the two I'd prefer to use RHEL.

There is a point where it becomes unreasonable to expect Red Hat to make available or allow "bug-for-bug" clones of their *product* with zero cost and zero friction.

The reason people want very specifically RHEL and not CentOS Stream is all the stuff outside the source code that Red Hat adds that makes, say, "RHEL 8.5" attractive but "CentOS Stream 8.5.2111" unattractive. The certifications, documentation, regression testing, and very specific compatibilities that go with RHEL 8.5 but not Stream.

If you're not a customer, you're not entitled to that. Because it's not merely about the source code at that point, it's about a whole lot of other work that is well beyond the software and that costs a ton of money beyond development.

Note: "I want to make some Docker build image...without having to worry" about an account is doable today, if Red Hat UBI has the packages you need. They do make a Docker image freely available based on RHEL that requires no relationship with Red Hat at all. See this for example: https://hub.docker.com/r/redhat/ubi8