On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 1:36 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@mattdm.org wrote:
And if instead your company comes up with some process for _actually_ managing everyone's active participation, well, okay, fine, but maybe that time would be better spent on figuring out how to actually just cope with CentOS Stream — or to skip all that and decide that you're at a scale where actually paying for RHEL isn't all that terrible after all and all the employees can concentrate on doing their actual jobs.
I'm trying to stay out of the weeds on many of the recent re-hashes of known concerns and known responses to these concerns, but I want to be clear about this point...
The larger the scale, the less attractive RHEL is. This is a fundamental problem with the RHEL licensing model. Once the RHEL licensing cost exceeds around $0.5M/year, you can now afford people to work on this problem. If you were to exceed $5M/year, you can have a team of people working on this problem. This is the problem I raised to our Red Hat sales rep in 2016, and this is the problem that they never provided a solution for. The discounts provided at scale were insignificant as factors. This is why "Facebook" (as one example of scale in context for this discussion) is using CentOS Stream, and not using RHEL.
If the Red Hat licensing model scaled properly, I don't think there would be a real problem being discussed here. In my case, we would have stayed an RHEL-only shop.
So yes - let's all keep the FUD to a minimum. Maybe IBM had nothing to do with this turn of events. But also, it's not true that if your requirements scale up, RHEL becomes more attractive. So both of these ideas should be left out of the discussion. Thanks.