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Comment by hrrsn | Hacker News Reader

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)

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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-...

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