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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

This all reminds me of the time I was donating a server+hosting to the Fedora project. I was setting up the server and asked my contact "I presume you'd like to be running RHEL on it?" "Yep." "Do you have a license key I can use?" "I can get one but it's annoying, just install CentOS."

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My former company sent 10 of us to a red hat kernel internals class to get us preped for moving away from hpux/Solaris. The instructor advised using centos to play around with after the class (before CentOS was bought). We ended up using redhat on one of the next projects.

Red Hat used to be a lot more lenient with the clones, just like Microsoft didn't care whether you used a genuine copy of Windows/Office or not. They probably assumed that once you became accustomed to CentOS, you would naturally buy RHEL when an enterprise project came along.

Maybe that's still a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it was in the past but isn't anymore due to the proliferation of clouds, serverless, saas, whatever.

This! The money isn't as big of a deal as the subscription management.

In my recent use, the Red Hat subscription management experience is night and day compared to even a few years ago. It's seamless and very much out of the way for most cases because of Simple Content Access[1]. And producing custom RHEL images for deployments in the cloud (or otherwise) is now supported by Red Hat through their Image Builder service[2] (which you can deploy locally on a RHEL box too[3][4]).

In general, there's been a huge revamp of the user experience for RHEL and associated services. And it's been for the better. The experience on console.redhat.com is stellar and worth it alone, in my view.

[1]: https://access.redhat.com/articles/simple-content-access

[2]: https://console.redhat.com/insights/image-builder

[3]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

[4]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

I have 0 love for what RedHat is doing, but one thing I have noticed: I have developed enterprise software for Linux for these last two decades, and the last time I saw one of these (huge) companies having an actual RHEL license was with RHEL 6. It's been CentOS and clones since then; for a while I think people even _meant_ CentOS when they said RHEL.

Same story with Qt, where they'll stay with Qt 4.x to avoid paying Digia even if practically all their software depends on it.

Weird. RHEL doesn't use "license keys".

A RHEL subscription is a license in all but name; “A subscription key you add to your account, which you then use to log into the subscription management service on the deployed server to then make use of the privileges the subscription grants.” is effectively one or two steps abstracted away from “enter this key directly on the system to access the privileges of the fully licensed software”

You're right, sorry for the confusion, I meant "subscription".

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