True, but you are not their target. Even if you did pay, it wouldn’t be meaningful revenue for the them. They could probably care less if you use Rockly/Alma Linux.
Their target is enterprises, governments, education and other institutions. That is why they don’t need Rocky or Alma to cease to exist, they just need to alter the perception and/or alter the value proposition.
The value proposition of those solutions has always been the perception that they are the same as Redhat. They get the patches directly from Redhat and other than support there is no practical difference.
If RH can change that perception and give organizational leaders and security departments doubts that it is safe then they can achieve their goal here.
The point was that they don’t need to sue other Linux distros out of existence, they only need to convince institutions they shouldn’t be using them.
When I say I work in a Redhat shop, it would be like working in a Debian shop, or an Ubuntu shop, meaning this is the primary distro used in our department, institution, company, etc. I guess I should have been clearer since I was using an idiom that may be an U.S. English only one. My apologies.
No. What I am saying is that you will get security fixes as long as it is current. Minor versioning never worked in such a manner where you could freeze and expect updates of any kind. This is true of Centos7, Rocky, and Alma. The only linux OSes that allow for this behavior are RHEL and SLES.
Yeah but if they are trying to create a situation where Rocky/Alma aren’t able to create a RHEL clone anymore than there will be no choice other then to use RHEL or CentOS Stream. And even if it stays possible but becomes a lot harder and Red Hat convinces most of the companies using RHEL clones to buy a RHEL subscription than eventually Rocky/Alma will become irrelevant and die off and again leaving people wanting to run a RHEL clone on their vps with no choice other than RHEL or CentOS Stream.
It is possible but hard to see the future right now.
That is why the best course of action for most institutions is to research/test alternative options while waiting to see how it all plays out.
For individuals, it is a little different as the barriers to exit are far lower and there are other factors such as your personal beliefs and ethical position.
why wouldn’t they? Since IBM took over, they have clearly shown that they don’t care about public opinion any more. All they care about is money.
the most effective one is the legal one.
exactly. If they would care about public opinion, they wouldn’t have killed CentOS 8/9 and also wouldn’t have closed down the source code. Any obstacle they put in the way means that at least a fraction will choose to go paid RHEL.
they currently are doing a better job in convincing people to leave the RHEL ecosystem completely.
Especially in the non-company sector there is absolutely no need to run any RHEL version, debian can do just about everything on the same level, and is totally open source.
Our sys admins had a meeting to discuss alternatives and their clear favourite to replace our soon-to-be-EOL CentOS 7 is Debian. The alternatives are Ubuntu Server and OpenSuSe, but both are only in the mix in case upper management says no to Debian. Paying for RHEL is completely out of the question and so is staying in RHEL with Rocky because they have serious stability concerns with the new approach, and also concerns about their ability to continue. They want to have an OS that they can count on running stable for at least 3 years.
The only reason why I am still staying with a RHEL/clone(and maybe later Stream) on my personal vpses is because of selinux. I tested Debian with selinux enabled and enforcing but when it comes selinux Debian is still far behind compared to a RHEL/clone.
I think the biggest concern, apart admins forced to learned a different distro, is the long term support RHEL offers, to my knowledge, only Ubuntu LTS provides 5 years support.
They won’t take down GPL code. Red Hat will try to take down RHEL Licensed code which is what is necessary to call a distro an RHEL - clone. And it is up to the court to decide if GPL or RHEL is the relevant license. If the court decides that GPL is the relevant license, Red Hat has lost and can try again in another court. If the court decides RHEL is the relevant license, they can issue a court-ordered cease-and-desist against Rocky/Alma.
And in front of the court, the old german saying “Auf hoher See und vor Gericht ist man in Gottes Hand” is really valid (translation: “On deep sea and in front of a court, on is in gods hand” - meaning that no one knows how the outcome will be)
As far as I know, Centos/Alma/Rocky never included any of the RH licensed code in the first place. That had always been excluded. Nothing with a RH copyright was included, only the open source components.
This is correct because Redhat would strip it out for them after their final RHEL tooling. In this situation they could say they were a RHEL clone even though they were not backporting security fixes etc to minor point releases. They were downstream.
Now CentosStream is midstream. It is between Fedora and RHEL. All the packages now go to a release-major git branch. This is the branch that CentosStream is built from and it is the branch that becomes RHEL after adding Redhat specific stuff. The clones can no longer claim to be clones. They are free to copy CentosStream and add their own tooling etc. CentosStream is essentially a 5 year LTS. It is not RHEL, just as it never was, except now this is unmistakably clear.
Rocky Linux, Alma Linux and, most importantly, CentOS, do not contain proprietary Red Hat stuff. This is all GPL. I honestly do not understand your point.
the CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream compilation copyright is licensed under GPLv2. To the extent you hold any copyright in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of packages making up the CentOS Linux or CentOS Stream distributions, you license that copyright under GPLv2.
Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement, such as (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some, but not all, of the total number of Units of Software or other Red Hat Products, (b) providing Software Access or Software Maintenance (each defined below) to third parties, (c) using Software Access, Software Maintenance, Pre-Production Support, Production Support and/or Development Support (each defined below) to provide support to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software and/or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each instance of such non-Red Hat Product for which you use Subscription Services.
If you want the stability of RHEL with gratis community support, you can’t beat Debian GNU/Linux. For paid support with commercial service levels, SUSE and Ubuntu are good choices.
