Red Hat Announces Free "RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure"

[mroche]

My whole Intranet is running on an open source stack, so do all my internal server qualify for this?

Is your intranet powering an organization's infrastructure that produces open source software? If yes, then you could probably apply. If not, then no. This ROSI program is quite explicit about this being for orgs producing software, not individuals/groups running it.

This program is available exclusively to open source projects and other organizations that support the production of open source software... RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure is not intended for individual developers, current Red Hat customers/partners, governmental organizations, healthcare organizations, academic institutions or non-profits that want to use RHEL outside of independent open source project infrastructure.

Cheers,
Mike

[MadeUpName]

I fave a bad feeling in my gut that EPEL will go payware some time in the not distant future. If that happens Fedora will be right behind it.

[raymondw]

My Rocky apparel is on their way.
And after the weekend I will try the first release as soon as it is available.

It's sad and converting the clusters will be a lot of work, but it is what it is.
Bye bye CentOS

[torsionbar28]

Ooh, free handouts!

This is not quite what open-source is about.

Precisely. Red Hat is in damage control mode, continuing to try and keep folks from switching away. The problem with their proposed model is that no matter how much "free" stuff they give out, ALL of it requires an annual subscription from the mother ship. If you fail to renew the subscription, or if Red Hat ever changes their mind in the future, you are stuck with a dead-end product that stops receiving updates.

Home and hobbyist FOSS users don't want to be tethered to an annual corporate subscription. "Please sir, may I have another!" Everyone knows Red Hat can take away these "free" subscriptions at a moments notice, just as they killed off CentOS without warning. The beauty of the legacy CentOS project was that its governance was independent of Red Hat, required no "subscription" and had no corporate overlords. It was the embodiment of the FOSS spirit, whereas Red Hat's current Annual Hand-Out model is more like being a Welfare Slave - it's pretty far removed from the Free-As-In-Freedom concept that FOSS was founded on.

Personally, I'm taking a hard look at FreeBSD as the replacement for all my CentOS servers. Potentially Rocky, if it manages to reclaim the legacy CentOS spirit and community.

[mattdm]

This seems like a very blurry grey area to me. I think a lot of companies who use RHEL for their "open source infra" are gonna get surprise audits and Redhat will find bunch of infra that's not compliant and ding them with license costs and penalties. My whole Intranet is running on an open source stack, so do all my internal server qualify for this? Seems doubtful.

If your internet is for the purposes of producing or supporting an open source project, then, yes, it qualifies. If it's infrastructure for something else that happens to be built on open source, then this program is not for you. I don't think that's very blurry at all.

[mattdm]

After the move to eliminate CentOS as free clone of RHEL, looks like they didn't expect how the community of CentOS would react. Now they do a remedial action after another like they were in panic.

That certainly is one way to look at it. Another would be: literally when the CentOS Stream change was announced, Red Hat said:

In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better serve the needs of systems administrators and partner developers. We’ll share more details on these initiatives as they become available.

... and people were like "that's not gonna happen they're gonna never make RHEL available for free it's all a money grab", and now those things are being announced just like the FAQ said they would be.

[torsionbar28]

The success of RHEL in the corporate environment was directly tied to the freedom of CentOS. Geeks were able install and use CentOS at home with no strings attached. This "in-home proof of concept" showed geeks how stable it was, and gave them the hands-on familiarity with the product that enabled them to confidently recommend RHEL to their bosses at work. It worked, and corporate IT environments rapidly drove Red Hat into $Billions of revenue.

How short-sighted the new IBM management must be, to have killed off the key to all this success. And how clueless they must be about the FOSS community to think that an annual subscription license is any kind of replacement for the FOSS independence that CentOS enjoyed. It's sad, really.

Here's hoping for tremendous success for Rocky Linux. Literally no one is going to use CentOS Stream as a replacement for CentOS.

[mattdm]

I fave a bad feeling in my gut that EPEL will go payware some time in the not distant future. If that happens Fedora will be right behind it.

EPEL is part of Fedora. Making EPEL "go payware" doesn't make any sense. I understand why people are upset about CentOS Linux (and particularly around the timing of the CentOS Linux 8 EOL), but the fears you are putting forth here are exactly the opposite of the direction things are going. CentOS Stream isn't "payware", and now in many use cases you can get a subscription to RHEL binary bits for production use for no cost — something you couldn't before this year.

Could there ever be a product based on EPEL? Well, in some ways that happens all the time... packages that are worked on in Fedora Linux and EPEL become part of RHEL, which is... "payware" (except, you know, for programs like this one, and also except for CentOS Stream, and also except you have full access to the source code, which is what the rebuilds are depending on). But charging for something which is equivalent to EPEL as a whole (an add-on to a RHEL subscription, I guess?)? That would need to come with significant value from Red Hat for your subscription (as you get with RHEL), and doing that is a huge commitment. I'm not anyone who makes this kind of product decision, so it's just my opinion here, but I don't expect anything like that anytime soon, but if there were to be such a thing, it would still need a) Fedora as a project and Fedora Linux as an integration point, and b) something like CentOS Stream.

From a Fedora point of view, I actually think the existence of such a product would be generally great, as it'd mean more resources in a perpetually-underresourced but highly-used part of the project. And like Red Hat investing in Fedora and CentOS today, that funded, full-time engineering work in the open benefits everyone. But like I said, I don't think productization like that is likely any time soon.

[andyprough]

... and people were like "that's not gonna happen they're gonna never make RHEL available for free it's all a money grab", and now those things are being announced just like the FAQ said they would be.

Literally no one said that at all, at least not on Phoronix. What everyone said would happen is exactly what is happening - a bunch of narrowly tailored free programs would be rolled out, trying to keep from losing the CentOS base of users.

[jrch2k8]

Well, i for one will migrate my remaining Centos 7 servers to ArchLinux/FreeBSD, seeing how poorly IBM is handling this i have very low confidence on them at moment and my gut tells me is better to get out of the ship now.