[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

On Friday, January 29, 2021 3:17 AM, Gena Makhomed <gmm at csdoc.com> wrote:

> On 28.01.2021 23:14, Neal Gompa wrote:
>
> > I'm optimistic. I know the folks at Red Hat are doing their best,
> > and I have faith in them.
>
> Yes, you are right, the folks at Red Hat are doing their best,
> but Red Hat is not independent, now it is an IBM subsidiary.
>
> So, as I understand, all decisions about killing CentOS
> were made not by Red Hat, but by the top managers of IBM.
>
> IBM acquired Red Hat for 34 billion USD,
> and now they just wants to return money.

There are issues with the governance but IBM was not one of them.

Long time respected members of the CentOS were at the Nov 11th meeting including Johnny Hughes and Thomas Oulevey.  If IBM had come in and strong armed the decision, one of them would have said something.

Bex has explained on the Ask Noah show that IBM is acting as nothing more than a trusted partner in this decision.  He further explains in the Register it was Red Hat that decided to change the funding for CentOS.

If you have any contacts inside IBM involved with AIX, I suggest you talk with them about their thoughts on how Red Hat is going about things.  If you can find one that will talk off the cuff, I think you might find they are surprised by Red Hat's actions as several of us.

> Killing the CentOS achieves several goals:
>
> 1.  Most of CentOS users are transferred to beta testers
>     for the next minor version of RHEL (CentOS Stream),
>     which makes it possible to improve the quality of minor releases
>     of RHEL, which can bring additional profit for IBM in the long term.

I wish there are a push towards most CentOS users to Stream.

Instead, it is clear making free RHEL licenses was a priority.  They are delivering on new RHEL terms before they make available Stream on gitlab and the other changes need for Stream to be a meaningful upstream.

There is probably hope that free RHEL users will eventually outgrow it and become paying users.  But it doesn't fit that there is any expectation this will increase profits in the next couple years.

> 2.  A smaller part of the CentOS users are transferred
>     to the paid version of RHEL, which brings additional profit
>     for IBM in the short term.
>
> 3.  For those users for whom neither option (1) nor option (2)
>     is suitable, the RHEL no-cost option was offered with a limit
>     of 16 instances. Over time, some of them will go to the users
>     of paid version of RHEL, also increasing the profit of IBM.

With how Red Hat went about things, I think it is more likely in the short term a small number of users will move to paid versions of competitors Red Hat.

It has been stated that this was not about increasing profits and I believe them.  This is about redirecting funding.

>     Killing the CentOS - "Nothing personal, it's just business".

That is true.

> Is it legal to use RHEL inside systemd-nspawn containers without
> registration and without activation subscription inside the container?

My understanding is they are allowing this.

> Do I need to start the registration process inside each container,
> or will the "yum update" command inside the container work without it?

It is not possible to use yum update without the registration ID.  It seems implied that copying the registration into UBI containers on the system will be permitted.  Maybe Bex can give a more clear statement regarding registration re-use on containers.  Otherwise, re-using RPMs from the yum cache or getting RPMs using yumdownloader seems to be permitted.

> Developer Subscriptions allowed to use for production workloads
> only by individuals, and totally forbidden to use by companies?

Listen to the Ask Noah show interview with Bex because that explains things better.  A president of a company can use some of their free licenses to for their  small business if they choose to.  However, the activation is still tied to the individual so if they leave the company the rights to the activation leave with them.  So, it is not totally forbidden but impractical.

> no-cost RHEL as I understand is forbidden to use by companies.

My understanding is a company can use up to 16 licenses for production use without support for free.

It just doesn't scale up across employees.

> 350 USD/year RHEL is forbidden to use for virtual machines.
> If you are using something else as the hypervisor then you can use the RHEL license

My understanding is if you purchased only a single $350 license you can use it for being a HV or a VM but not both.

> 800 USD/year RHEL is too expensive for each bare metal / VM / container.

> Website hosting is low-margin businesses, it is unreal
> to pay 800 USD/year for each virtual machine/container.

I agree.  A lot of hosting control panels do not officially support or recommend CentOS 8 or RHEL 8 yet.

Time will tell what impact moving the CentOS 8 end of life date from 10 years to 2 years has.  It may be that the established hosting control panels will be promoting migrating to other distributions.

> One hosting server can have several dozen or even several
> hundred of virtual machines or systemd-nspawn containers.

With that density of VMs per hypervisor, talk to your Red Hat account manager about RHEL OpenStack Platform.

> As I understand, there are only two available options for me:

There are much more than two options available.  Listing them out goes beyond the scope of this forum.

My focus at this point is on the transistion to Stream and how poorly that transistion is occuring so far.

The offer to get for free access to GPL/LGPL that prohibit redistribution on the bases of being branded as owned by Red Hat like cattle more offends me than being of any use.  If Red Hat could have been more respectful of the spirit of Copyleft then maybe trying RHEL again would be a consideration.