Hacker News Reader

Comment by kklimonda | Hacker News Reader

RedHat provides developer subscriptions to their products: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/getting-red-hat-devel...

View on HN

And this will be expanding to cover more use cases. See https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10:

_In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better serve the needs of systems administrators and partner developers._

How about discounts for universities? They could take a page from Microsoft, which introduces students and teachers to its ecosystem with low-cost versions of Windows and Office.

The .edu I used to work at had a site license for RHEL (and Satellite servers) 15+ years or so ago.

I believe we were one of the first 10 or so, but I don't remember exactly when it started.

I don't know the specifics but I would be surprised if this isn't one of the areas under consideration.

And these licenses and subscriptions come and go at the whim of the corporations that own them. Nobody informed would base their open source project/community/ecosystem on something like this, unless they want to be left out in the cold when the plug gets pulled in the future.

See today's other news about Travis for an example of why

Surely even less so now that they have demonstrated they have no problem pulling the plug on CentOS.

However, if you're in the SMB space and run CentOS as production because money is tight but you wanted a stable LTS distro and have never needed any technical support, this move has just yanked the rug out from under you and there appear to be no provisions in the pipeline to change that.

Your only option is to migrate away from RHEL/CentOS, period. It's likely that Red Hat doesn't care much about us smaller orgs with only 100-200 servers/VMs though. Sad day.

Thanks for the link! Seems like an oversight that it was left out of the CentOS Stream announcement.

Summarizing the FAQ:

  - the bits are the same, the differences are the terms of use and the self-support level
  - one subscription per user
  - allowed to use on 1 physical system (up to 2 processor sockets, 16 VMs)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com