Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL for Open-Source Infrastructure” | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL for Open-Source Infrastructure”

phoronix.com

18 pointsthg11 comments

What is RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure [1]?

>Under the program’s terms, eligible organizations will be granted access to no-cost RHEL subscriptions for any use within the confines of their infrastructure. This includes build systems, continuous integration (CI) testing and general project requirements (i.e. web servers, mail servers, etc.). These subscriptions will be self-supported by default, which provides full access to the Red Hat customer portal, knowledge base articles and forums, and also include Red Hat Insights, our proactive analytic tooling. We may also be able to offer no-cost support depending on the scope and nature of the organization.

Since the whole internet is run on Open Source Infrastructure. I assume every Web Company can use it for free?

It is very tiring trying to read these PR announcement that is long and unclear.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-ent...

And care to explain the Downvote?

It says "the needs and requirements of projects, foundations and more" and "projects, communities, standards bodies and other not-for-profit software groups engaged with open source" which seems clear enough who this is for. It's not for any Web company.

Rocky Linux will come with no such restrictions.

And Alma Linux is here already, with backing from a commercial company with has direct access (same time as Red Hat) to the security issues.

They probably should have announced this before they poisoned the CentOS well.

I mean, or you could run Debian or Ubuntu. Why would open-source infrastructure have such a strong desire to run RHEL?

I guess this is for people who have already locked themselves into CentOS.

Because debian and ubuntu are not trustworthy enough as server platform. They are not involved in the technical details of the basics, such as compilers, binutils, libc, kernel, systemd, gnome, wayland, servers, ... contrary to RedHat and Suse, who are maintaining these things. CentOS is the server standard. Which was the free RHEL variant, without support. 80% of the world runs this.

Debian and Ubuntu also have a horrible security track record. For devs behind a firewall it does not much harm, and they try to attract much more packagers with their focus on petty law and social issues. Which is fine. Most prefer the political issues, but some prefer the technical competence.

I think you'll find in the modern era / younger generation, running Ubuntu on the server is actually very common. Especially in the cloud. Most usage of CentOS I've seen in newer builds is strictly for hardware that requires vendor driver support, which is becoming more and more rare as vendors upstream their drivers.

CentOS was the server standard 10 years ago. And most of the downstream distros like Scientific Linux and Oracle Linux are dying.

80% of the world runs this, citation needed because I don't think that's remotely accurate and likely represents your personal bubble.

https://distrowatch.com/

Besides, on the server the real trend I've seen is Alpine. Far less attack surface than CentOS anyway. If your applications work with musl libc, you're in business, and worst case you can install glibc (which packages like OpenJDK do).

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