Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Small Production Environments

[Paradigm Shifter]

I decided to use my "free" RHEL 8 licenses to upgrade my home server. I was expecting the annoying license keys, but what I was not expecting was the stepped-up telemetry and spying required if you want updates via DNF to work. Red Hat scrapes quite a bit of info including hostname, all IP addresses, MAC addresses, hardware make/model, serial numbers, and asset tags and sends it all to their big database. It even had the serial numbers of individual RAM DIMMs from dmidecode. For corporate users, it might be nice to view all of this on the RHN/RHSM website, but for personal/dev systems, this is a no-go privacy invasion. I'm sure some companies would prefer not to leak hostnames to RH/IBM, since they often contain project/partner names.

That would have me running a mile. That's more invasive than the information Microsoft demands!