You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.
I think overall Rocky is a net positive for the world and for Red Hat.
Obviously this is entirely my opinion :-D
There's also an impossible-to-measure factor in the form of eco-system benefit though. For example, I would never have paid for RHEL had I not entered into the eco-system through Fedora and CentOS. So while RH didn't make money from my CentOS usage, it did eventually make them money because I bought RHEL later when it was worth it. I don't know how you would calculate that, but it does offset ethicality deficit somewhat as well
That said market competition in general is a good thing, and I don't doubt for a minute that Red Hat prices would be a lot higher without the competition. It's a complex equation that's impossible to calculate since the inputs are immeasurable and in many cases theoretical.
Rocky Linux is a shining example of both a free market and the open source community working to the benefit consumers. I don't see how that's unethical.
Dropping CentOS Linux was a completely different thing and one should also acknowledge that there are two very different parts of the CentOS community.
Those that simply needed a free RHEL, didn't have any benefit from CentOS Stream. However, their usecase is filled by Alma/Rocky.
Downstream CentOS distributions however only got benefits from CentOS Stream. There are many private ones, for example Facebook runs on a CentOS derivative, but the most prominent example is Alma itself, which existed (IIRC with another name) even when CentOS Linux existed.
And to be honest, only the latter are really part of the community. Downloading an ISO doesn't make you part of the community. I myself used CentOS Linux on a small EC2 VM but I didn't consider myself to be part of their community (I have since switched to Amazon Linux, for what it's worth).
So all that Red Hat did was basically restructure their collaboration with downstream distros. On one hand they enabled those distros to collaborate even more to RHEL development, which is now public (including individual patches to the kernel, if you remember the circa 2011 kerfuffle). On the other hand release rebuilds are entirely in the hand of the community.
Now, I am not saying everything was perfect. The announcement sucked in many ways, and there still isn't a good solution to use RHEL container images on public CI. People inside Red Hat (including me) will all tell you the same. However, it's intellectually dishonest to ignore that there was and is a CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world.
There really wasn't a CentOS world beyond that, because it wasn't a true community distribution. Red Hat never attempted to meaningful involve the community, all board members or whatever pretend org CentOS has are RH employees. There were never any kind of community elections or anything of the sort.
Red Hat killed CentOS.
Honestly if all you know about CentOS is "download ISOs and report bugs that with some luck will be forwarded to RH Bugzilla", you don't know anything about the CentOS community.
Again: downloading ISOs doesn't make you part of a community.
FWIW, clients I dealt with were universally thrilled with RedHat support, the ones who had it. I had one tell me over the phone once, "Oh yeah! Red Hat is amazing! If an issue gets assigned to an engineer, it will be resolved by that same engineer. Unlike you guys."
Red Hat funds an enormous amount of the development of projects (like the kernel), and makes Fedora one of the best (IMHO the best) distros for personal computing, so is one of the top contributors to the community at large. Their support also actively fixes bugs and sends them upstream.
Contrast that with many of the cheaper 3rd party supports, who rarely if ever send contributions (beyond bug reports, which are sometimes a positive contribution, but frequently are net drain because the bug reports don't contain enough info to be reproducible or actionable). They also don't do much or any development.
Of course this is a broad stereotype. I'm sure you can find 3rd party support providers that do contribute to the community.
Linux is not developed by thousands of volunteers on their free time in their garage.
At least 85% of commits to the Linux kernel are from corporates (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, RedHat, etc). Linux is free and open source code, but very largely written by people who are paid to do so, by companies that need to somehow make a profit.
RedHat amounts to roughly 20% of these corporate commits, and that's counting in the share of other corporates that frankly mainly only contribute work for their own drivers.
I see paying for RHEL as being 50% for support / 50% for sponsoring Linux development as a whole.
You are definitely right that RH has pushed things in their own interest, but if those things don't offer value to the broader community, then the community won't adopt them. Red Hat can't force Debian or Ubuntu or Arch to adopt anything. They can push it through Fedora Cent and RHEL, but that's it. The other distros adopted systemd because it offered benefits/improvements over existing things like Upstart. I like firewalld, but that's a good example of something that is only on RH despite RH pushing it. If systemd was really such a negative, then you'd see distros like Devuan take off. A frequent criticism is things like, "Red Hat made Gnome dependent on systemd" which isn't wrong, but they didn't just do it because they could. There were real benefits there.
I think the reality of life is that there will always be people who want things to change, and those who don't want the change. To succeed you have to find a balance.
Also important to remember when decrying "fragmentation" (which I decry also btw), in a massive heterogeneous community like open source, you're gonna have users who have completely different needs and use cases, and both are valid. The beauty of it is the code is open and free, so people can serve niche use cases as well as standard.
[1]: Query string gets you past the "monthly limit" paywall that sometimes pops up: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
It was bad because when I chose CentOS for servers at work I thought I could count on letting them live their lives for about 10 years without worrying about them. I have a lot of things to do and taking care of those servers is a very low priority.
Thank God there was a script to convert my CentOSes to Rocky and that it went great, otherwise it would have taken time I don't have to reinstall those servers.
The whole "we never put an EOL date on it" excuse was really weak. It looks to nearly everyone like just an unintentional omission, not a legal hedge. It ended up working out well like you said thanks to Alma and Rocky, but the panic and uncertainty it caused was wholly unnecessary.
There are things to dislike about red hat, but quay is one I would praise them for instead.
edit: ah.. former employee.. so that part was already done :)
I disagree. RH is one of the top contributors to many of the major projects that make up the distro. Also the process of building/maintaining a distro is itself enormous. The 3rd parties have none of that expense so they can undercut the cost easily. In the end it hurts the whole ecosystem, while benefiting a select few.
If this hurts the whole ecosystem, all community developed distributions must have been hurting it, too, by your bizarre interpretation of free software and/or arrogant take on ethics.
Explain how anything you've said so far in this sub thread can't be summed up to "red hat good, everyone else leeches".
Where does the code come from ? All in the game yo.
There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the customer may not have the experience to deal with and can be well worth the price paid. But at the end of the day if there's an actual bug all the way upstream in RHEL, only RHEL can (permanently) fix that.
I've dealt with Red Hat in the past and one good thing about their support is that if you have a particularly thorny problem or a genuine bug, you will often eventually end up talking directly to someone who is either wrote the code or sits next to the person who did.
If you have a support contract though and open a case, the level and quality of support is usually very high.
Feel free to write to me at pbonzini@redhat.com, I don't work on Kerberos myself but I know people in the team.
CentOS/Rocky has better ROI is better when stuff doesn’t get fixed on something you are paying money for.
No one asked them to do that and put it in open source, if they are not happy they can go to closed source or different license... Like Microsoft... Maybe the new OP employer? That would make a lot of sense when I see his attitude
But the vast majority of "support" for Linux isn't engineer-level, it's likely config and setup. Which is where both Red Hat and others try to make their money.
My very naive understanding is that it’s just the OS and then only even a distribution (just to emphasize- very naive), what would they need apart from some networking and to run some software on top that needs so much support?
Having consultants out there using CentOS/Rocky/whatever gets these "not a good fit" customers burden off Red Hat, which is probably an advantage to them. I operated what amounts to a "phone a Linux friend" service for ~18 years, and that sort of help just doesn't really fit into Red Hat's offering.
It's nice in many ways to be able to disconnect from the licensing model and just be able to deploy Linux boxes, but still get help when you need it. I recall one conversation about Red Hat licensing related to a machine I was installing for a client named "The Fedora Project" that went like this:
"I assume you'd like me to put Red Hat on there?" "Yes." "Can you provide me with a license key to use on it?" "Uhhh. Just go ahead and install CentOS".
If you want to fix this, make a RedHat license be significantly cheaper than the equivalent Windows product. Charge for support by ticket/case and only support licensed boxes. You'll earn a lot more because it'll look cheaper to the beancounters.
Also RH packages open source project and also does not necessarily gives back to every project.
The right to help your neighbor is important to open source. I find Rocky does just that.
Rocky and Alma popped up for folks that want a bug for bug compatible RHEL OS.
RH publishes all their sources (including the MIT/BSD/etc ones that they don't have to publish). They're the very opposite of "closed source". I don't know of them suing anybody. And nobody is complaining about people using the code, or about the existence of Rocky or Alma or any other rebuild distros.
And you literally said:
>I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.
You cannot acknowledge that they owe everything based on willing participation in an ecosystem where they wherein they openly made a promise and follow that up with the idea that its immoral for anyone to rely on such a promise. It's logically and morally inconsistent.
Gross is just an emotive label you have slapped on after incorrectly concluding that such actions are unethical.
It cannot be unethical to rely on a freely given promise that the other side has derived substantial value from.
Red Hat received the entire basis of their business by virtue of their side of that promise they cannot and indeed haven't tried to withhold performance of their obligation in that regard.
Under what ethical theory do you propose that creating downstream distros is unethical? Is it likewise unethical for Ubuntu to exist? If your answer differs why?
Redhat sales are now firmly set in the IBM enterprise model. I'm sure it works for them, but it didn't work for us as a potential customer moving from Centos.