[cpncrunch]

I think Ubuntu has a decent business plan, charging people $225/yr to extend support from 5 to 10 years. I would happily pay that in order to avoid having to migrate as often.

CentOS just gave everything away for free and then is wondering why they're not making any money.

[reader_mode]

Paid CentOS support is called RHEL - the whole point of CentOS is repackage GPL RHEL stuff without the licensing fee. The only way I see this being viable is them getting bankrolled by a huge cloud provider - but cloud providers already decided that having their own distros was a better option.

[toyg]

> GPL RHEL stuff without the licensing fee

Without the absurdly high licensing fee. A more reasonable amount (be it a saas-like low monthly charge or one-off 3-digit fee) would probably go down fine with enough institutional users to generate a decent amount of money.

[corty]

Well, absurdely high isn't really true, it is quite similar to e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/pricing

There is a some up/down depending on various rebates, volume licenses, support included/excluded, etc ("nobody pays sticker price"). But in general, RedHat is in the same order of magnitude as Windows but a little cheaper due to no per-core-pricing, no necessary CAL shenannigans or weird limitations on number of users/size of company/VM/PM and stuff.

But of course it's true that in domains like HPC or cloud computing, the huge number of licenses and machines involved make a few hundred bucks per year just too expensive in sum.

[cpncrunch]

Indeed, but most of us don't need support. We just need security updates, ideally for 10 years.

[reader_mode]

AFAIK there's a licensing tier for RHEL that gets you that - don't know how it compares to Ubuntu.

[mroche]

For RHEL Server (MSRP)

Self-Support: $350/yr Standard: $800/yr Premium: $1300/yr

Those are all starting points without including potential addons.

[Nullabillity]

Apparently the self-support edition isn't allowed to be ran on VMs. WTF?

[dralley]

Every year between 2009 and 2017, Canonical lost money. In 2018 after several rounds of layoffs they finally made a profit of ~10 million, but their revenue actually dropped from the year before.

Whether or not it is a good plan in theory, it clearly doesn't seem to be working that well for them in practice.

[someperson]

CentOS's 10 year support window was unreasonably long given that there's no benefit to upgrading to RHEL (and it's paid employees at RedHat during the security backporting work).

The free RedHat tier should have a shorter support window that's still long enough to attract users who want a stable platform to build long-lived appliances.

[ilikeerp]

I charge more per hour for my consulting, I had a bottle of wine that cost about that last week for dinner. What revenue do they actually get out of that model?

[dralley]

They don't, Canonical's finances are terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25450835

[toyg]

To be fair, they do much more work than CentOS ever did (or Rocky would have to do).

In fact, Ubuntu does too much development for its own good. People jumped on it because it was “a usable Debian updated more often”, and they got all sorts of crazy UX experiments.

[iso947]

Do AWS ubuntu images come with a software charge of say 2 or 3 cents an hour?

[loeg]

RHEL has a business model too.

[cpncrunch]

Yes, indeed, but I was referring to Centos. There isn't enough of a benefit for most of us to upgrade if we get security updates free for 10 years and don't need support.

[johannes1234321]

And that shows how pointless the CentOS kill is. Those users won't go to RHEL but Debian/Ubuntu or if it has to be RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux and then lobby their other vendors to support Debian/Ubuntu or some other distribution as well.