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Comment by talawahtech | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that RedHat is actually planning on making a no-cost version of RHEL available without support. I think they are still in the process of deciding exactly how to pitch it without cannibalizing existing sales.

They are using this fallout as an opportunity to gauge the market. Risky to be sure, but they didn't do it without considering the risks.

From the article:

  > I am confident that CentOS Stream can cover 95% (or so) of current user workloads stuck on the various sides of the availability gap. I believe that Red Hat will make solutions available as well that can cover other sides of the gap without too much user heartburn in the end

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They have already said they will be expanding the license for the developer edition, but there’s no way they will be allowing it on production systems.

And they should have had this all worked out before making the announcement. As it is, they are just promising a bunch of things that don’t yet exist, after they literally just destroyed all trust in them.

I work for Red Hat but have zero inside info on this. This is just my opinion.

I personally think they will be allowing some production use of free RHEL (assuming we get free RHEL. I expect we will but don't want to count chickens before they hatch). Enterprise production I don't know, but personal production or prod for non profits and/or open source projects, I could totally see that being an option. I'm personally excited for the announcement. I hope they get it out soon.

If that's true, this would go down as one of the most monumentally stupid executive decisions in Open Source history. It would make them look really, really stupid, like they had no clue why their users used their products.

Nobody wants to use CentOS. We have to use it because it's the cost-effective alternative to RHEL. And nobody wants to use RHEL either, but we have to, because vendors won't support anything else.

Part of this is our (the users'/businesses') own fault. We allowed our businesses to get away with depending on an OS with no support until we needed it, which is not really sustainable.

What we maybe should have been doing is creating vendor-neutral open standards for the platform, like a standard kernel (vanilla, anyone?) and a standard userspace distribution (vanilla, anyone??). That way any Linux distro could "meet the standard" ("Install package standard-distro-20200816 to use packages and settings aligned with the standard", and then every vendor could support "the standard". Vendors wouldn't need to lock themselves into one distro, and we wouldn't either. Basically a POSIX for Linux. But there's no money to be had in that.

(It is in fact possible to run a Linux distro without patches. It's buggy as all hell, but it can be done.)

Yep Red Hat is in the process of figuring out some no-cost options (and lower cost options as well). I work for RH but am outside of this so have no internal insight.

> They are using this fallout as an opportunity to gauge the market. Risky to be sure, but they didn't do it without considering the risks.

Yes you're right, but it wasn't done this way intentionally. I agree they should have coincided these announcement, but it didn't happen that way. They're doing their best to work with what they have, but they certainly didn't intend to stoke the outrage in hopes to study it :-D

More of my thoughts on the whole thing if anybody is interested: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...

It would be amusing if they end up calling it "Red Hat Linux" again.

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