https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10
You've burned people. Don't expect to then sell them Aloe Vera.
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.
No, they won't migrate to paid RHEL. This is massive goodwill burn for RH.
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.
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.
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 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.