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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

Yes this hurts. My use case is specific: I'm a dev but since we're 2 in the IT service with barely any budget I'm also a (modest) sysadmin and they also call me when the printer or the TV doesn't work.

So a few years ago when Debian decided to have faster release cycles I migrated all my VM to CentOS: once the OS is installed I don't want to think about it for the next 10 years.

I still didn't finish my Windows 7 to 10 on all my desktops, I'm swamped with users wanting to do Zoom / Teams / Skype / Whatever visio conferences, I have 3 new dev projects for 2021 and now I have to migrate all my CentOS VM...

Yeah, thank you RedHat I won't forget / forgive that.

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So let's recap, you don't have budget to spend on Linux but pay Microsoft for Windows and probably Office... And now you are angry for allegedly not having a 10 year support for your OS, so you can avoid some work on upgrading or migrating the VMs. I suspect you should be running VMware as well (and paying for it), instead of KVM or some other open source hypervisor. If the VMs are on a public cloud, you are paying for it indirectly as well. You may have some additional work indeed, but you saved a lot on not spending on a paid Linux distro, being Red Hat's or any other distro, therefore it should be worth it... take that into account

Nice try IBM

Debian now has LTS releases:

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Before giving up on us just yet, I'd encourage you to check out our developer program for proper RHEL that's free. And I'd stay tuned for announcements that are coming in the first half of 2021 (as mentioned in our FAQ). You might find we've got a program for you:

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10

Are you saying we should (mis)use a program designed to give free RHEL for development/testing only, and use it in production as well?

You don't get it: I have no budget, if it's not free it doesn't happen. And I'm certainly not going to trust Red Hat now that they pulled support 8 years earlier than promised.

I have nothing against you in particular, but if you know the guys that made this decision tell them the same words that Linus Torvalds said to Nvidia.

I will never touch anything Red hat ever again because I will remember how after a quite sucky 2020, Red Hat made sure my 2021 would not disappoint either.

T&C for your developer program doesn't allow for running it in production; which is exactly what many CentOS users do.

No, they won't migrate to paid RHEL. This is massive goodwill burn for RH.

If there truly is a free RHEL release for certain use cases being announced in H1 2021, there's absolutely no excuse not to announce it now. You've terrified a LOT of people. Giving a 'well maybe next year we'll announce a solution' is not a response.

You've burned people. Don't expect to then sell them Aloe Vera.

I appreciate you commenting.

I think people would panic less if the CentOS Linux cancellation were announced at the same time as these upcoming announcements. Without them, there's a lot of uncertainty and it's hard for anyone depending on CentOS 8 to plan.

> in the first half of 2021

Well, you've panicked people who are/were moving forward with CentOS 6/7 to 8, and not on RHEL because no budget. "Don't worry, sometime in the next 6 months there might be useful info for you, or there might not".

People aren't going to stick around waiting for that information. You've pulled the rug out from under us and we need to plan sooner rather than later. RHEL isn't do-able due to cost, CentOS isn't do-able because you've just killed it, so away we have to go.

RHEL licensing is really disappointing for the low end. I use CentOS for my home lab / self-hosted development setup and there's no way I would switch to RHEL. It doesn't matter because I don't spend any money, but I'll probably swap to Ubuntu next time I re-build my server.

Here [1] is an example of what I dislike. That page doesn't explain if a subscription is for 1 host or all my hosts and it doesn't explain if it needs to be renewed annually or if I get a perpetual license after the first year of support.

I currently have 11 (extremely light usage) CentOS VMs running, but almost everything is Docker containers. I could likely consolidate it onto a single, bare-metal host if I wanted. It would be worse for me, but I could get a single $800 license instead of $8800 for 11 licenses. It's a moot point though. $800 is already too much for the value I'm getting out of it.

I could use the developer program, but I use an issue tracker to track work I do and I back up the whole system nightly. Technically that's production (to me), and I've seen IBM bait and eviscerate someone for licensing using extremely unethical tactics, so I'll never use something that isn't very explicitly free for production.

I think RHEL is technically superior to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is a far better product when it comes to support lifecycle, licensing, and support. I can spin up an Ubuntu server and unlimited VMs with the promise of a reasonable lifecycle and the option to click a button and buy support.

Where is that in the RedHat world? If RedHat would have released a product like CentOS Stream, but with RHEL branding and a dead simple way to go from a free, community supported version to a paid, commercially supported version then for people like me it makes sense to be the "beta" tester. I think it's a fair trade. Downtime doesn't have a huge impact on me and I'm willing to spend time bug hunting / reporting bugs.

TLDR; The licensing is a massive hassle and is a terrible value proposition for small users. You're not winning any mindshare unless it's as simple as Ubuntu makes it.

1. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser...

> It doesn't matter because I don't spend any money, but I'll probably swap to Ubuntu next time I re-build my server.

It kind of does matter, though, because at least for me, I am much more familiar with my home systems than what I use at work.

I started out using Redhat at work, so I migrated my home lab to CentOS to gain more familiarity, which meant that when new projects started, I advocated for Red Hat. But if I'm forced to migrate to a different production grade distro at home and develop expertise with it, the next time there's a question about what OS to use for a new project, I can imagine myself pushing for the one I will have spent the last few years tinkering with at home by that point instead.

nothing is really free in this word! I think rollling your own distro is the only way to truly be free!

Agree! It is the beauty of open source to build it you own way. Google or other giants build their own distro as well, but they have enough talented people to maintain it

And often is based on Debian, like Google's distroless.

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