Red Hat Expands Developer Program to Convert CentOS Users to Subscribers

In this video, we discuss IBM - Red Hat's latest announcement catering to CentOS users. Red Hat is expanding its developer program offerings to try converting CentOS users into Developer Program Subscribers. Red Hat has had this no-cost/ free program for years, but this expansion is clearly made to bring previous CentOS users onto RHEL.

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[_MrSnrub]

The plan for IBM to shift all CentOS users to Ubuntu is working well.

[joesworld]

"I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it further...."

[YeOldeTraveller]

The Plan was that all the CentOS users would buy RHEL licenses. There was never any intent to make any of these changes when the first announcement was made.

This is all damage control.

They have burnt all trust in this community.

[Nimitz_oceo]

Red hat shooting themselves in one foot, reloading and accidentally shooting themselves in the other foot.This has all been a classic historical IBM tactics, apparently some companies never change

[harriluuppala]

Thx a lot for sharing your toughts and opinions? Great indeed!
As a biz leader I have used to work with risk-and-reward pricing model(s). When a company I have worked devs a totally new biz, then all parties should pay on front the investment. Early Unix times HW suppliers supported (incl. budget to pay part of the implementation work) for the new biz creator company. Somehow I feel (by experience) that there is also need for ”negative-price” along with no-price and low-price to support new initiatives. Also when you install a complex EDGE type of multi-server on-prem system on client you need to test full system well b/f transferring the system to customer site. A commercial license should alllow ”installation and testing time” before transferring system to client, and just from that should start the commercially supported license period to the client. Anyhow IBM has been biz oriented - at least years ago when I did most of biz with IBM AIX (yeah - very long time ago!).

[michaelhampton]

I think the reason they don't seem to have all their ducks in a row with these plans and announcements is that they're making them all up on the fly: that they never expected their original CentOS announcement to go sideways, that they are still reacting to the backlash, and with some degree of desperation. Canonical already lets people download Ubuntu and go, and they're still making money. This wasn't really a problem for Red Hat until IBM took over though...

[kgchrome]

the biggest use case i have for centos is as dev and test environment servers. then roll out stage and prod on licensed RHEL.

also, ROCKY Linux will be what CentOS used to be, a de-badged recompile of the RHEL source when it comes out.

[etherboy]

I trust IBM more than Oracle, but that is very faint praise. We have a few workloads on CentOS 7, but everything else has been migrated to Ubuntu Server. Why would I leave myself in a position by some soulless conglomerate that doesn't understand the Linux community? It's crazy.

[squelchedotter]

I think personally, this has really underscored how little of the FOSS advantage is the price to me. I'm fine with spending money, but I'm just not interested in having to deal with "developer programs", registrations, activations, license limits, etc. The advantages of RHEL just aren't enough to make up for that pain and worry.

[queenannsrevenge]

For people saying that this is reactionary and there was no plan, I would suggest you listen to the Alex Kretschmar interview on Linux Unplugged from December 8th; he actually made a subtle reference to a program he knew that was coming, and how he wished RH had waited to make the announcements at the same time. He wasn’t at liberty to talk about anything else, but I honestly think based on that reaction that it was a matter of crappy timing on Red Hat’s part.

The fact is, Legal departments in large corporations move VERY slowly some times, and sometimes ends up with a disjointed implementation.

[willyhillstrom]

Embrace, extend, extinguish, I can see this as the brain child of a certain CEO. If I remember correctly centos was a completely adversarial distribution.

[Fishmaster]

Give it 3 years and IBM will assume everyone has forgotten about this and they will throw out everything in this announcement and start trying to charge for everything.
Also, as mentioned in the video, the primary issue of no migration or support still hasn't been addressed yet. If I am on CentOS I am looking at finishing my exit plan by the end of February not getting an other potential option that has to be researched to see if its even a good option.

[westa]

Liked and subscribed. As a professional sysadmin with a working home lab I find your channel very accessible and informative. I’m sorry it took me so long to discover you.

[metallurgico]

I love how STH is growing.. I love the new lens, the new hoodies and THAT Patrick lol

[SolarityTechnology]

CentOS was a great way for people to learn Linux and the long life cycle of RHEL was great for companies. We have a large RHEL footprint and I am worried that this will negatively impact finding qualified candidates in the future. To me this is the beginning of the end of Red Hat. On the topic of subscriptions, the subscriptions are way to complex with to many SKUs.

[gnul]

In my view that really hurt our Linux community, that was the worst move Red Hat had ever done, I would never have believed that they would ever do anything like that; I ain't usually anyone's fan, but I kind of was a Red Hat fanboy, or just respected and appreciated them very much, but now, I see them like any other capitalistic company. Job accomplished hurting their imagine.
I of course still appreciate their work they did and still do for open source in general, but that kind of fan thing is gone at least for now and the near future, I lost trust...

I downloaded, installed and configured my servers with CentOS 8, with the strong believe in the promise we all got before even downloading: *10 years of support.*
This really even hurt my feelings, I feel much betrayed, I had that 100% certainty of that promise when downloading, I would never have dared to dream if Red Hat or CentOS promised me that, that it could ever be broken. 💔

It's just sad.


I would have gone CentOS with all my future servers...
Paid support, or even a registration for me isn't a thing...
I could pay up to 5$ per month for unlimited licenses, but I don't want to, cause I never asked for professional support, I DIY or ask community, which wasn't ever needed yet.

So I'll maybe go to Rocky Linux.

That really hurt the Red Hat Linux derivative branches, it's overall market share will probably go down, and trust to Red Hat especially by professional companies which need reliable partners is probably gone too, can't imagine these emergency meetings of these hundreds or thousands of companies cause of that.

Especially they have no benefit by this...
Now Rocky Linux will be the next, why killing it in the first place?

They could have merged this thing into Red Hat brand, basically offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux ISOs for free download without registration needed, like any other dostro, but no support.
If temporary one time support is needed, companies could have bought that, or agree to one of the support plans or whatever..
Downstream or Copy of RHEL, that's not relevant at least to me, just the same software but more time passed until update; they could have offered both, downstream under RHEL label, and normal RHEL, ;

but a testing version like CentOS stream just is neither a real option nor an alternative.

[berndeckenfels]

Pricing is not the major factor stopping me from using RHEL for utility use cases, if a server is productive and I can buy me help it’s great. But when I have to deal with machine registrations or not having public Repos, that’s just painful. Oracle is more user friendly in this regard

[JasonTaylor-poxc]

This is counter productive to RedHat/IBM, especially as more/most workloads are moving to Docker or containers. The specific distro is less important, as long as it can run containers well. Just look at the work by AWS, Google and others on container-focused Linux distros. Even RedHat has one (Fedora CoreOS). Yes, there are still a handful of use cases for non-container workloads, jump servers, or general utility systems - but this is becoming the exception, not the rule.

[JerimiahMayle]

I still hope to have Rocky Linux coming out. Because I still have some trust issues with RHEL and IBM.

[mr.mcsmithsmith]

I've used centos for my home servers for a while now, sticking with 7 until Rocky Linux comes out. Otherwise I'll be moving to opensuse.