Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Small Production Environments

[cookieninja]

I don't understand the uproar, CentOS was only ever really a workaround to deal with the fact that Redhat required you to pay to get their distribution in a ready to use format. Even choosing a different name was a workaround, not a choice. The name is protected by copyright, so had to take the sources and change the branding.

I create development VMs for work to use with IBM software, using automatic building and configuration tools. The changes made by CentOS create problems that have to be troubleshooted then worked around. Being able to easily build & update ISO images of RHEL available for free without jumping through hoops like Ubuntu, CentOS and others is good news.

I get that change is frustrating and painful, but this is a necessary one, an attempt to fix a bad situation that should never have existed

[curfew]

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

Welcome to Phoronix where every single news article is written using only full-paragraph sentences!

[Paradigm Shifter]

If RedHat/IBM had done this before they pissed off almost every CentOS user going, I might have a little more willingness to trust them. As it is... no. The Linux community has always been easy to polarise (as with most groups, let's face it) but I find one thing above all most amusing among the fallout from the untimely end of CentOS: the idea that it seems to have made a fair chunk of people decide that Oracle, maybe, are not as evil as they thought... while others wield rhetoric exclaiming that Oracle are worse than Microsoft!

It may come as a shock to some, but no big business is your friend. They will act in their best interests - not yours.

As soon as I read the headline, the words "panic mode engaged, damage control enabled" ran through my head.

Because that's exactly what this is: an attempt at damage control. How successful it is has yet to be seen.

[grung]

Welcome to Phoronix where every single news article is written using only full-paragraph sentences!

What I find quite funny is that I almost never read articles here and I always go straight to comments

Regarding licensing unfortunately this 16 licenses is a big trap. What if you grow and get to the point you have 17 servers... Suddenly you must buy 17 licenses.

CentOS thing for me is more of the betrayal situation. If distribution is called community than it should not be RHEL making decision without consultation with the community. To me Redhat would be in better situation if they released something like RHEL Lite without support and without some not critical functionality with easy upgrade path to RHEL and without possibility to downgrade [You should still be able to do it, but you would have to pay for the license].

[Paradigm Shifter]

To me Redhat would be in better situation if they released something like RHEL Lite without support and without some not critical functionality with easy upgrade path to RHEL and without possibility to downgrade [You should still be able to do it, but you would have to pay for the license].

Non critical functionality: RedHat branding and the phone-home licensing part.

Everything else is going to be critical to someone, somewhere. For example, I don't care about Apache or PHP, but I expect thousands of CentOS users do. But if MPI was removed, I'd be stuffed. Well, I wouldn't, because I'd just compile it myself...

[Buntolo]

What I find quite funny is that I almost never read articles here and I always go straight to comments

Regarding licensing unfortunately this 16 licenses is a big trap. What if you grow and get to the point you have 17 servers... Suddenly you must buy 17 licenses.

CentOS thing for me is more of the betrayal situation. If distribution is called community than it should not be RHEL making decision without consultation with the community. To me Redhat would be in better situation if they released something like RHEL Lite without support and without some not critical functionality with easy upgrade path to RHEL and without possibility to downgrade [You should still be able to do it, but you would have to pay for the license].

I think the right thing would be charging for extra users after the first 16: 17 users 1 licence, 20 users 4 licences, 1000 users 984 licences, etc.

I know nothing about CentOS deprecation, were can I find info about this? Is there a Phoronix article?

[whitecat]

I never in my life read such a stupid point of view... "The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux"

if you need to find a linux use this side: https://distrowatch.com/

I meant "The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux" to replace CentOS !

Of course there is nice alternatives (Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu LTS) but it's not CentOS. And when your workload / staff relies on RHEL-like, you needs CentOS not something else.

[whitecat]

I also dont think you can guarantee OEL to be the same without the Centos backing. With Centos doing the heavy lifting Oracle had an easy job.

OEL minor versions are released in average one week after RHEL.
CentOS on the other side take generally one month.

For big version like EL8, OEL 8.0 was released 2 months after RHEL 8.0.
CentOS 8.0 was released 4,5 months after RHEL 8.0 !

And OEL provides security errata for the packages, useful to integrate the OS in Spacewalk or Satellite. CentOS just doesn't do this work.

So I'm not really sure CentOS helps Oracle in any way...

[qarium]

I meant "The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux" to replace CentOS !

Of course there is nice alternatives (Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu LTS) but it's not CentOS. And when your workload / staff relies on RHEL-like, you needs CentOS not something else.

ok much better but i think in this case you should just use rocky https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Aiming-For-Q2

[mppix]

I meant "The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux" to replace CentOS !

Of course there is nice alternatives (Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu LTS) but it's not CentOS. And when your workload / staff relies on RHEL-like, you needs CentOS not something else.

Out of interest, what workload runs on RHEL but not on say Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS?
In my experience, the support gap between RHEL and Debian/Ubuntu have closed to the point where I cannot think of anything. Of course, transition may not be trivial..