RHEL now has a free tier!

[Kent Perrier]

If you missed it, you can legally now deploy RHEL, in production, on up to 16 systems with the (free) Red Hat Developer Program subscription. IMO, they should have waited for this to be ready before announcing the change to CentOS.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel

Kent

[Howard White]

!No Bueno!! Long live Whitebox Linux!!

Howard

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[Michael Chaney]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 8:47 PM Howard White <hwh...@vcch.com> wrote:

!No Bueno!!  Long live Whitebox Linux!!

I couldn't figure out what you were saying there, but I think you meant "¡No Bueno!!".

Michael 

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Michael Darrin Chaney, Sr.
mdch...@michaelchaney.com
http://www.michaelchaney.com/

[Howard White]

<-- too lazy to lookup the upside down "bang."

> mdch...@michaelchaney.com <mailto:mdch...@michaelchaney.com>
> http://www.michaelchaney.com/

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[Michael Chaney]

<---- not too lazy to troll Howard

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[Blake McBride]

I've been using Linux nearly exclusively for over 15 years.  I use LinuxMint on the desktop and Ubuntu on the server-side and have always been quite pleased.  I tried CentOS and Red Hat in the past and found them to be out-of-date and no easier or more reliable than my choices.  So my question is unless you are a corporation that wants to pay big dollars for specialized support, why would you want to use Red Hat?

Blake

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[Tilghman Lesher]

One of the benefits of using Red Hat is that they guarantee that the
ABI will be stable for a number of years (about 10). If you're a
small business, and you can't afford a lot of time to be fixing
software, especially when breakage comes in security updates (and we
really, really want people to apply security updates), then having a
stable ABI is beneficial.

If you're a hobbyist, or you're in the business of IT support, these
aren't really critical, and it's part of the learning experience to
find that something is broken and learning how to fix it.

Both approaches are valuable in different contexts.

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Tilghman

[Kent Perrier]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 7:37 AM Tilghman Lesher <tilg...@meg.abyt.es> wrote:

One of the benefits of using Red Hat is that they guarantee that the
ABI will be stable for a number of years (about 10).  If you're a
small business, and you can't afford a lot of time to be fixing
software, especially when breakage comes in security updates (and we
really, really want people to apply security updates), then having a
stable ABI is beneficial.

If you're a hobbyist, or you're in the business of IT support, these
aren't really critical, and it's part of the learning experience to
find that something is broken and learning how to fix it.

If you have hundreds to thousands of servers to maintain, you don't scale very well when they break during a patching cycle. So the long term stability of RHEL is very appealing. 

If you are working in a small shop and your employer can absorb the downtime (and not hold you responsible for it) caused by patching gone wrong then going with a distribution that has an increased "churn" is fine.

I tried CentOS and Red Hat in the past and found them to be out-of-date and no easier or more reliable than my choices. 

Take a look at RHEL8. That has changed with the application streams. RHEL8 isn't stuck at the version of httpd/postgres/whatever that was current at the time of release. 

Kent

[Gibson Prichard]

Sometimes, vendors provide packages or ISOs to install on Red Hat and while there might be a way to coax them to install on Debian or Ubuntu, the vendor will only support the software if it is installed on RedHat or CentOS. Such is the case with Avid iNews, the widely-used newsroom software that drives television news operations. When Avid moved iNews years ago from SCO Unix to Linux, they chose RedHat and they also support CentOS (or did). FYI - three of the four TV stations in Nashville use iNews to craft their on-air newscasts (scripts, incoming network news feeds and connections to teleprompters and character generators). This is but one example of a piece of software that those of us who work in TV use RedHat for, even when it's not our favorite or preferred OS when we have the choice. Support contracts and stability matter in business and as someone who gets to make those decisions in my day job, I am not about to shoehorn something onto Ubuntu just because I like it over RedHat and run the risk of invalidating support agreements.

It's not just huge businesses that stick to RHEL.

Gibson Prichard

Nashville, TN

gib...@prichard.tv

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 4:51 AM Blake McBride <bl...@arahant.com> wrote:

[Csaba Toth]

I work everyday in Debian derived distros, but in my mind Fedora was the free "version" of RedHat. Now that the "enterprise" RedHat is free the big question is what can RedHat give you that Fedora or CentOS cannot? What can be valuable for IT and DevOps is some kind of management tools for managing some IT infrastructure (servers, desktops, workstations, network equipment, etc). Maybe also some tooling to help manage upgrades, common installation scenarios like Apache-MySQL-PHP-Workdrpess and alike. I have to admit I totally don't know what are the paid features of RedHat, I'm super curious.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CABwHSOt120qMgE_ryoHV4MBVYtLCAYkdRk6SvOpYTfjHmksmpg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Tilghman Lesher]

Fedora hasn't been the free version of Red Hat in quite some time.
Instead, Fedora is akin to the bleeding edge development version, and
CentOS was the free version (with unlimited installs) of Red Hat.
Going forward, Fedora continues to be bleeding edge, CentOS is the
preview version for the next release of RHEL, and RHEL development
license is the "free" version of RedHat, albeit with only 16 possible
free licenses per organization.

You can still go with (barf) Oracle Linux to essentially get RHEL for free.

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Tilghman

[Csaba Toth]

Good to know! But what does RHEL offer being a paid distro over CentOS? Is it just the support and contract stuff, or is there some extra software involved?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CAHPkZcUrJt3jn2KkH_r2DvovGBGU0%3DcJPZ%3DgK32KmiyDbVxjtA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brian H. Ward]

The free-tier is limited. RedHat is not completely free, but free for small use cases (I think 16 instances per account). In the past, CentOS was the free/unsupported variant of RHEL, while Fedora was the test bed for new and exciting stuff the _might_ make it into the RHEL distro at some point.

The change to allow _some_ use of RHEL without subscription fees is part of the response to RedHat/IBM changing the model for CentOS (which will no longer mimic RHEL, but will be the short-term test bed for RHEL). For companies/individuals who wanted to work with RHEL, but couldn't because subscription prices made that impossible, CentOS *was* the option -- now free instances of RHEL are that option.

AFAIK, Fedora will continue to be very bleeding edge, while CentOS (next year) will become the leading release for RHEL.

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[Blake McBride]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 8:41 AM Kent Perrier <kent.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 7:37 AM Tilghman Lesher <tilg...@meg.abyt.es> wrote:

One of the benefits of using Red Hat is that they guarantee that the
ABI will be stable for a number of years (about 10).  If you're a
small business, and you can't afford a lot of time to be fixing
software, especially when breakage comes in security updates (and we
really, really want people to apply security updates), then having a
stable ABI is beneficial.

If you're a hobbyist, or you're in the business of IT support, these
aren't really critical, and it's part of the learning experience to
find that something is broken and learning how to fix it.

If you have hundreds to thousands of servers to maintain, you don't scale very well when they break during a patching cycle. So the long term stability of RHEL is very appealing. 

1.  I've been managing Linux (cloud) servers for more than 15 years with Ubuntu.  Never had a problem.

2.  99.999 percent of us don't maintain "hundreds to thousands of servers".

3.  I still maintain the Ubuntu servers are more up-to-date and therefore are more likely to be reliable and secure.

4.  I've had problems with Red Hat software when their OS has software in the base OS that is more than 5 years old!

--blake

 

If you are working in a small shop and your employer can absorb the downtime (and not hold you responsible for it) caused by patching gone wrong then going with a distribution that has an increased "churn" is fine.

I tried CentOS and Red Hat in the past and found them to be out-of-date and no easier or more reliable than my choices. 

Take a look at RHEL8. That has changed with the application streams. RHEL8 isn't stuck at the version of httpd/postgres/whatever that was current at the time of release. 

Kent

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[Tilghman Lesher]

In terms of the paid version, yes, the main thing is the support
contract. Something I learned some time ago is that, in the business
world, having a fix is less important to executives than to have
someone to blame for when problems arise. Red Hat takes the blame if
anything breaks. That's helpful to IT employees in the organization
who would otherwise bear the brunt of management's ire.

CentOS, going forward, no longer has a lengthy support period. It's
about a year or so, which is considerably worse than Ubuntu LTS. I'm
really not sure who the market for CentOS is, other than potentially
software partners who want to test their software on the preview
release of RHEL, so that they're ready to go when the next version is
released. CentOS is likely to see *massive* shrinkage in their
installbase past 2024, when support for CentOS 7 expires.

If you want the long term support of RHEL, you either get a support
contract and use a paid license or use the development license, or you
switch to something like Oracle Linux, which will track RHEL's
changes.

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Tilghman

[Kent Perrier]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 10:13 AM Csaba Toth <csaba....@gmail.com> wrote:

Good to know! But what does RHEL offer being a paid distro over CentOS? Is it just the support and contract stuff, or is there some extra software involved?

There is no SLA for security fixes to make it into CentOS. Generally they hit pretty quick but there is no guarantee you will be able to patch for a zero day on day zero :)