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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

Article kind of hints at it but I suspect RHEL is going to get a new licensing model to capture the CentOS crowd under the RHEL umbrella. Once that's done it will be easier to upsell support contracts since they'll have the users in their license DB.

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If this is their plan they have screwed up pretty bad and shows a clear mis understanding of enterprise customers

We like stability, if they were going to change RHEL licensing to capture CentOS enterprise customers they should have announced those changes ahead or in tandem with the CentOS Announcement

The CentOS Announcment as is read was "Hello Enterprise Users of CentOS, we know we promised to support CentOS 8 until 2029, April Fools, now we are going to cut support at the end of 2021, and maybe we will have some options for you early 2021 so call us"

This uncertainty and betrayal of trust is going to be hard to come back from

Yep exactly. This is outright refusal to use anything they produce going forward, as they've shown that long term commitments mean absolutely nothing.

I’m honestly surprised they don’t just make RHEL free and take the CentOS market for themselves. Gate the current RHEL specific features behind support contracts and call it a day. Why make your customers have to migrate to pay you?

Yeah I really wonder if this is coming. It's wishful thinking on my end so maybe isn't reasonable, but man it'd be neat. I get annoyed when people point out "you can already get a dev license for free." Sure, but there are hoops to jump through and you can't run it "in production" (which I think is mostly a meaningless claim, but still not something I like).

Nevertheless I'm optimistic and hope they announce it sooner rather than later. Hopefully the current blowback will move things along ;-)

This is what Oracle Linux already does, so Red Hat is only hurting themselves by not doing so, since anyone who wants this can just go to Oracle. (Notwithstanding the fact that Oracle is evil.)

Yea, going to Oracle is always a bad idea and they'll find a way to get money out of you.

It's pretty common for me to convert customers from Oracle JRE/JDK to OpenJDK/JDE when Oracle says they need to pay millions for no good reason.

But here's the kicker: the worst thing Oracle can possibly do is to say "yeah, that whole Linux distro that we used to give you for free? We're not doing that anymore." So even if you do move to Oracle Linux and they go full evil, you're no worse off than you are on CentOS right now.

Disagree: RH isn't likely to sue you.

Look I just did an Oracle to OpenJDK transition for the same reason but I don't really think Java SE licensing is an example of Oracle being particularly Oracle. It's just that Oracle Java isn't free and they're doing what every company is doing switching from one-time license fees to subscriptions.

There are no RHEL specific features.

Au contraire, there are and they're quite valuable their enterprise customers. The most important is the detailed security errata published along side their RPM packages which are necessary to do things like "only install security updates" or "check if any packages have upatched vulns."

RHEL but not CentOS also come with security/regulatory profiles like STIG which are necessary to run in certain environments like the DoD.

Red Hat also has a license to distribute Oracle Java that CentOS lacks and so it's not available in their repos. They also ship with the Cisco network drivers that CentOS again doesn't have a license to distribute.

There's also the extended support for minor releases. With RHEL, it's possible to stay in a minor release for longer while in CentOS you always have to migrate to the next minor release. For instance, according to the graphic at the middle of https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata with Extended Update Support one can stay at RHEL 8.2 until the middle of 2022 (so RHEL 8.2 has a full 2 years of support), while with CentOS, you had to migrate to CentOS 8.3 this month if you want to keep receiving updates (so CentOS 8.2 had only 6 months of support before being replaced with CentOS 8.3).

It doesn’t surprise me. CentOS usage is huge. If they can turn 20% into paying customers it would be a huge revenue win for IBM.

One hopes this newfound revenue goes toward making Linux better, but we will see. Red hat employees work on a lot of core things.

Doesn't matter, they poisoned the well with this.

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