Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Small Production Environments

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Small Production Environments

Following the announcement at the end of last year that CentOS 8 will be ending and instead focusing on CentOS Stream as the future upstream to RHEL, there have been many concerned by the absence of CentOS 8 past this year. In trying to fill that void, Red Hat announced today they will be making Red Hat Enterprise Linux free for small production deployments...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-RHEL-No-Cost-16-Systems

[ivan.cwb]

That could be really good for RHEL support in DigitalOcean et al. Last time I checked it was possible to upload a specific image to create a droplet.

On the other side, I'll keep looking forward to RockyLinux development...

EDIT: Maybe it would be a little bit smarter to do that before the CentOS Stream fiasco... But they are probably in damage control mode now...

[microcode]

Wow, this actually makes a lot of sense.

[ermo]

Time will tell if this move will be considered "too little, too late" or if it turns out that it will assuage customer fears.

The cheapskate in me can see how some entities will try to get around the licencing requirement by having several different free developer accounts and then only licencing one RHEL server per 16 developer-account servers.

But if I can think up this scheme in a minute after reading the announcement, I'm sure that there is bound to be legalese in the developer-account licencing agreement that specifically prohibits this scenario.

[kpedersen]

Take your little handouts kids!

"Please sir, can I have a little more"

[anarki2]

Wow, that's pretty darn sweet.

[torsionbar28]

Not really a substitute for CentOS. This isn't "free forever". This is "free in 1 year increments... for now". You still need an active RHEL subscription for this to work, which requires annual renewal, and agreeing with Red Hat's TOS. In other words, they can change the terms and conditions at any time, or eliminate the program altogether. Or they can kick you out for no reason at all, just because they don't like you. (a la Jack Dorsey) Sounds to me like this is a desperate attempt at retaining disappointed CentOS users who would otherwise switch away.

[skeevy420]

I've been expecting something like this.

Jokes on them, though. I prefer rolling and would use Stream if I were picking a RH based distribution; just not a fan of six month dist upgrades so Fedora wouldn't be my first choice.

Now, if Fedora Rawhide had a more stable Leather edition, sort of like what Manjoro does to Arch, that'd be my first choice.

Either my motherboard or PSU went out so excuse the single paragraph Android sentences.

[SyXbiT]

First, they should have announced this along with the CentOS deprecation. Second why use this over Rocky?

[lumks]

sort of like what Manjoro does to Arch, that'd be my first choice.

You can do that just fine. Just do not install updates until you think it's ready and go for it. That's what Manjaro does.

I also think this is a sweet deal by Red Hat. It should just be a bit different. Because the step from this free model, to the next bigger is a huge one in terms of price to pay. So Lets say i'd want a simple Red Hat http server for my costumers, I'm a small 1-5ppl company. It's not really worth it to go for it, but on the other side there isnt anything reliable that you could use where you have some kind of support behind.