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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

It was announced a year in advance, if that’s a rug pull your org has bigger problems.

EL variants are most popular in companies that consider project turn around to start at the six-month mark for fast work. It's popular precisely because you can settle on one version of one distribution and use it for literally a decade. So yes, one year is a rug pull.

Maybe I've always worked at larger employers than most, but a one year surprise to reevaluate and transition your operating system sounds incredibly disruptive when the original promise was support through 2029 and the "successor" is very different.

In my experience major updates like this are discussed annually with eval, testing, and milestones set weeks and months apart. The transitions are often pushed a year or more when issues come up. Resources are dedicated to all of this.

It sounds like there are a lot of similar options with relatively easy transitions (away from Red Hat), but you still have to choose who you trust going forward and carryout the transition.

If you’re relying on the free offering that’s competitive directly with their enterprise offering and your organization is so large that it’s going to take over a year to switch - you should have probably been paying for RHEL to begin with. My midsize outfit that was running from top to bottom on centos did everything you described over the course of about 2 months to switch to Alma Linux. Hundreds of servers managed by an amount of guys I can count on one hand.

Sorry not sorry, but large outfits expecting to coast on a free offering don’t get sympathy from me.

Many organizations, especially larger ones, have investments with much longer time cycles than 1 year.

Then the probably have the budget to pay for RHEL. Sorry not sorry.

In SV it's rare to pay for commercial OS or other support due to the scale. I have never worked anywhere that paid for anything, whether it's RHEL or Cloudera or whatever, unless it's only available as SaaS/Cloud.

That's why working at FB or Google is like going back in time as far as monitoring UIs, etc.

Some of the clever large companies took advantage of "site-wide support licenses." For example, Netflix paid MySQL AB $40,000/year for MySQL site support so they didn't have to hire any MySQL DBAs. Just keep filing support tickets. :)

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