[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?