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?
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)
16 licenses is the proverbial tip.
we know what happens next.
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.
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.
Does that include virtual machines?
"The no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals grants the ability to install Red Hat [...] on 16 physical or virtual nodes"
"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-...