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Comment by Espionage724 | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros?

I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. If I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server. And if I believed RH was being intentionally hostile, why would I support them at all and not go with a completely unrelated distro like SUSE?

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Because soon that will be the fork everybody will target,and the de facto standard.

RHEL could have survived for a while in hostile mode if everybody was complacent (maybe making the entire thing profitable). But this is exactly people not being complacent.

Anyway, you can bet there will be infighting once this is established. But well, the power that free software grants for people to misbehave is very limited.

Who is everyone? I imagine any serious business is paying for RHEL instead of an unheard of fork, and in my use if I wanted to change from Fedora Server I'd go to CentOS Stream, followed by RH with a free dev license.

I'm getting the vive that some people just want free RHEL, feel entitled to have it, and don't realize that actual RHEL is free within reason (apparently up to 16 simultaneous machines). Nobody remotely concerned about security is running a non-mainstream distro and public-facing services in an age of randomware and crypto.

It's a fork that by definition is an exact reproduction of the thing they fork. So it cannot become a new, different standard.

> provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros

Only SUSE has its own distro, or rather, whole family of them: SLE, openSUSE Leap, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The others are rebuilds of CentOS Linux source.

> If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free.

You can't get RHEL for free.

Are you sure?

Things I read online say it's free, including https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download

As I understand, the only costs with RHEL include using it across a large number of machines in enterprise, and customer support. Someone using it on a few machines in a home lab should be fine I imagine?

You can sign up for the developer license and install it on up to 16 machines, after that you need to pay

Now I'm even more confused as to why RHEL's changes are this controversial :p

16 machines is more devices than I have in my house, and enterprise seems like they can just pay for RHEL. I'm also betting there's not some thorough verification process that would prevent you from running RHEL free on more than 16 machines (seems almost too easy, but just make multiple free accounts per-16 machines? RH I'm sure would be happier to have people running RHEL at all than intentionally seeking out free license violators)

Because Red Hat’s competitors have been stirring the pot and because people have become accustomed to a free RHEL and feel entitled to it.

16 devices doesn’t cover everything I have at home, and managing the license(s) isn’t something I’m looking to do.

To be honest, if you need 20 licenses because of a home lab, I'm sure if you wrote to Red Hat, they'd probably provide some extra free (or nearly-free, like 50$ a year or something) licenses since your use case is home-related, not business-related.

That said, I can understand how one wouldn't want to do that. For a home lab, I'd say any distro is totally fine.

So you'd rather use some random fork of RHEL?

For personal use I use Debian almost exclusively. Laptops, desktops, servers, VMs, Raspberry Pis, all of it.

Pre-Stream CentOS was never my preference, but I did spend some time running it to learn the RHEL way. The free licenses would fill that gap.

At work we run RHEL where we needed support and Alma where we don't. It was chosen for me. I'm watching to see how this plays out, but not incredibly concerned.

> Now I'm even more confused as to why RHEL's changes are this controversial :p

16 licenses is the proverbial tip.

we know what happens next.

> up to 16 machines

Does that include virtual machines?

It seems possible: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-... > "10. How many Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements are included in the no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals?"

"The no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals grants the ability to install Red Hat [...] on 16 physical or virtual nodes"

From their faq page [1]:

"The Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals is a single subscription, which allows the user to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a maximum of 16 systems, physical or virtual, regardless of system facts and size."

[1] https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...

Yes you can.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...

This falls under the heading of "technically correct" - in the sense that the limit is high enough for people to make the argument you are, and yet too low for most enterprise use-cases. Worse, the offer could be withdrawn at any time.

If you're enterprise with more than 16 machines, you can and should probably be paying for RHEL.

What I'm not understanding is why people need to use RHEL and would resort to free random forks of it, instead of just using CentOS Stream or Fedora that are basically the same thing, actually from RH, and 100% free. RHEL is not that special.

> can and should probably be paying for RHEL.

I'm on the fence about that. I wish people were more willing to financially support open-source development, but I've worked with dozens of customers using RHEL over the last 10 years and never seen a single one of them open a support request - on that basis I can see why people feel that the price is too high. When the options are "get gouged" or "be labelled a freeloader", the outcome is pretty obvious.

> just using CentOS Stream or Fedora

I think the rise of free alternatives (Amazon Linux) and a DevOps-style mindset (no patching, just burn it down and redeploy when updates are needed) are exactly what has motivated this squeeze - RHEL is losing relevance in a lot of places, so RH/IBM are left with fewer potential customers and so just end up squeezing them harder.

You don't pay for the support requests, you pay for the work of letting you update to the next minor release at your own pace, having those updates be rock solid, and having security fixes even on older releases.

In other words you pay for not having to open support requests.

When a free alternative (CentOS, Rocky) exists, you can get those benefits without the cost. The only real differentiator RH has is support.

Being an open source company means that RH has a non-standard business model and should expect non-standard profits. Their business model is inevitably doomed, but rather than innovating they are going with the "lock-in and gouge" model, exactly like Oracle.

No, CentOS/Alma/Rocky only supports one minor release at a time (that's up to four major releases for a 10 year lifetime). You can stick to a major release but you have to update every 6 months or you'll skip the security updates too.

Red Hat supports 15-ish release streams at this time between RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9. A lot of customers need that because validating a base system update takes months and they cannot afford not having security updates in the meanwhile.

The subtlety of different support levels for minor releases is something I hadn't come across before, thanks. I'm surprised RH haven't made more of that recently.

In fact the recent change basically consisted of going from 1 to 0 shipped stable branches (CentOS Stream is the mainline of RHEL). But most of those stable branches have never been public in the first place.

In my opinion 99% of end users would be served well by CentOS Stream, but the strong marketing of bug-for-bug compatible distros on part of Rocky (and to be honest it's a fig leaf to pretend CIQ is not behind that) hampered the adoption of CentOS Stream and the users' perception of its stability.

Those benefits that CentOS, Rocky offer, as you said, are without cost because the cost is shouldered by Red Hat. If you're a 1:1 rebuild, you can't introduce your own fixes, so CentOS, Rocky rely on Red Hat to write and produce a fix that will then be rebuilt "free of charge" as you mention.

How is that lock-in from Red Hat's part?

“No support requests” was non-trivially due to RH’s efforts. Did those people thing that stable OSes just build themselves?

Sure, and that's enough motivation for people to be convinced to pay something - I just think the current price is too high.

Nothing in life is ever inevitable. Progress is never certain.

No support requests usually means everything is working. No news means good news

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