[evan1107]

Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?

[freedomben]

It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a different ecosystem that can be used for serious workloads.

[WesolyKubeczek]

What do they do there so it’s suddenly not suitable? Introduce bugs on purpose? Break dependencies just so? Put in insecure defaults? If you are not an organization that requires an actual compliance department to be able to work for governments and the military, how is it different?

People have been doing this, or running Ubuntu LTS without Pro or other forms of paid support from Canonical.

[bonzini]

According to Red Hat, CentOS Linux should not have been used in production either.

[symlinkk]

If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?

[freedomben]

> If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it

That is an extremely incorrect premise. There are tons of things in production that people don't make money on. Tons of new products don't make money for many years. And even if it is profitable, profit margins are often thin and RHEL is not cheap.

I have about 10 services in public-facing production right now (on Alma), and only one is profitable, and that runs in a container anyway (the host is not RHEL, just my container). I also have about a dozen or so personal/private services that I use for myself and my family. Those don't make any money either, I spend about $80 per month to run them. If I had to pay for a RHEL license for each of those, I'd just have to shut them down.

Which seems more reasonable to you: move my life to a different base that does support my niche, or shut everything down?

[ElectricalUnion]

> (the host is not RHEL, just my container).

Are you sure that is really a supported RHEL configuration?

As far as I know, to get support unless you have a pretty special (and more expansive and expensive) support contract you're supposed to run a RHEL host and a RHEL base layer for the container images.

Your configuration looks like running standard RHEL over something not-RHEL, but without anything besides binary compatibility; so why not run RHEL UBI?

RHEL UBI has a much more lax license that you can almost pretty much use and basically redistribute freely, and you can get support for the RHEL components on it.

[symlinkk]

So what if a company isn’t profitable? Do you think that companies don’t need to pay for electricity or rent just because they’re not profitable?

As for your “personal/private services”, aren’t those covered for free under the RHEL individual developer subscription?

[type0]

You almost certainly not if you are in academia, why do you think Scientific Linux ever existed?