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by lxe 1091 days ago
What is RHEL compatibility so important and why is it always such a hot topic?
2 comments

Red Hat is like the 10,000 pound gorilla in the world of Enterprise Linux, and traditionally has walked a fine line (well, mind you) in bringing open source to the table against enterprise proprietary vendors.

Other open source competitors like SUSE and Canonical have much smaller revenues, so Red Hat could be seen as having a bit more influence over Linux's overall direction (they employ a ton of devs, they have a ton of resources). Case in point, the systemd controversy.

There's also a historic argument that one cannot trust FOSS in the hands of any corporation, but we start getting into more philosophical and nearly-religious debate at that point.

> Red Hat is like the 10,000 pound gorilla in the world of Enterprise Linux, and traditionally has walked a fine line (well, mind you)

I'm not particularly fond of this latest move but I'm unconvinced they've fallen off the line yet.

Even with this decision in place I believe that Red Hat will still be by far a net positive to have around for open source overall.

They could change my mind about that, certainly, but they'd have to make a substantially more egregious move to do so.

Not RHEL compatibility, because that's what Stream also has, the bug-for-bug similar behaviour is wanted when you have RHEL servers but test on Centos without having to bother with licenses or terms.
If you have RHEL in production, you are already allowed to install it on test servers without restrictions. Or so I'm told.