More accurate title: Rakuten did not want to pay for RHEL licenses and still does not want to pay for RHEL licenses
They were using CentOS for no cost previously and have switched to another no cost RHEL rebuild (Rocky).
They were using CentOS for no cost previously and have switched to another no cost RHEL rebuild (Rocky).
Semi-related: now that RedHat is an IBM entity, with the attendant deprecation of CentOS, I fund myself lumping RH into the "fully commercial Unix" mental category.
CentOS is still out there. It's just that it does no longer follow RHEL on every step, but is ahead of it all the time.
Also, you can't use Centos anymore for test environments. You now have to go with Redhat and the entire licensing shebang when you init your test vms.
No it isn't. CentOS Stream will never make a change which would be out of place for RHEL to make, which means ABI and APIs (and version numbers for the most part) remain stable for the entire lifetime of the distro.
That is wholly incomparable with something like Debian Testing or Arch or Fedora Rawhide which "roll" through major updates all the time.
The source is open but so were many of the one commercial unixes. In fact some customers in the early days of Unix used to change their codebase a lot.
I don't think commercial and open source are mutually exclusive. Not the OP though so perhaps they meant something else.
Personally I don't think open source would have to be free as in beer but I don't like it when big tech takes too big a role in it. Eventually it'll just become another cash cow.
Incorrect.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
Since they involved CIQ, I'm pretty sure they are now paying support for Rocky, which, if you read the article, was clear they didn't mind paying for. It was the per-cpu subscription that was not realistic in their business model.
They're in the "Backed By" section of https://rockylinux.org/about/ , so I'm going with "yes".
Giving back to the community could be both more or less than paying cash.