[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 1:36 PM Matthew Miller <mattdm at 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.

-- 
Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com>