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by peterwwillis 2465 days ago
> Why doesn't RH just let people use RHEL without support ?

They do: it's called CentOS. CentOS was acquired by RedHat in 2014, keeping an independent governance body. But the reason RedHat didn't release itself as open source was Oracle. They were rebuilding RHEL and reselling it, so RedHat closed up its process and did the bare minimum required to comply with the GPL. Brian Stevens confirmed it. So now RedHat exists in order to make money off a supported product [and fend off competitors [and enforce trademarks]], and CentOS exists to keep control over the open-source spin-off of the same. So if you want the real deal certified supported enterprise distro, you have to pay for it, and if you want an uncertified slightly-not-the-same open-source alternative, that's free.
2 comments
jacques_chester 2465 days ago
It's worth noting that the existential threat has eased a lot for Red Hat. Openshift is growing as alternative revenue stream but has a long way to go before it replaces RHEL subscriptions. But now that IBM is keeping the lights on, Red Hat has at least a decade of breathing room it didn't have before. It can afford to loosen the RHEL reigns a bit.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we compete against Red Hat in a number of ways.

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yrro 2465 days ago
The crucial difference between CentOS and RHEL is the speed of security updates. While CentOS is building a new RHEL point release there are no security updates!

This makes me unhappy to connect a CentOS machine to a production network, let alone put it on the Internet.

In addition the metadata that lets you install only security updates or bugfixes is not present in CentOS.

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