I've just been catching up on what's been going on in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux world the last few days. You all may remember a couple of years back, when CentOS 8 was discontinued and Red Hat created a new CentOS Stream distro to replace it, whilst giving assurances at the time that the RHEL sources would continue to be published even with the death of CentOS proper.
Well, it now seems that they've restricted this further, and that the official RHEL sources going forward will only be available to Red Hat subscribers, and even then under terms which will not permit them to be made available for re-distribution, as explained by Red Hat themselves at the following links:
What this appears to mean is that there is, as of right now at least, no officially-supported way for maintainers of distros which are downstream clones of RHEL (such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, VzLinux, etc.) to continue to access the RHEL source, and thus to be able to continue to provide RHEL-compatible updates.
Such distributions could, in theory, re-jig their entire concept to be upstream of RHEL rather than downstream and make themselves sort-of-clones of CentOS Stream rather than RHEL. But that would defeat the reason for being for most of these distros, which is to be binary-and-bug-compatible with RHEL itself.
So, interesting times once more ! We'll see how this plays out in the coming weeks and months I guess. No impact on any other non-RHEL distros, or on RHEL users themselves, but could herald another shift in the distro landscape if this does indeed become another thing that Red Hat/IBM don't back down from.
That essentially seems to be the thinking that I'm most often encountering, yes - that this is simply a straightforward attempt to kill off downstream RHEL clones, in the hopes that people using them will either jump over to CentOS Stream, or just bite the bullet and buy a RHEL subscription.
It may be that they're thinking that the little guys like AlmaLinux and Rocky can't afford to go toe-to-toe with Red Hat/IBM in court to test this out, if it ever came to a legal argument. But then again, Oracle certainly could, if they find they have no way to keep Oracle Linux going now. If there's one thing Larry loves (and is good at), it's long and messy court battles. So this could yet backfire fairly spectacularly, but we'll have to wait and see.
Of more concern to many however is what this might mean in the future for other open source projects which are supported or maintained primarily by Red Hat, but which are not themselves core parts of RHEL - such as Ansible, for example. If this RHEL strategy does pay off one way or the other for Red Hat/IBM, might they think of trying to lock down their other FOSS projects in a similar way ? Perhaps - but that might be a step too far. But then again, two years ago they said they wouldn't do exactly what they're doing now, so who knows...
From my perspective i've worked(ing) with mostly RHEL or its clones (Rocky/Centos/Alma).
Would always suggest to people, if they do not have the expertise in house, to buy the RHEL and get support from them. Will not do that anymore of course and many will follow.
The industry cares less about the distro itself, especially nowdays in world of (mostly) containers.
Distros of today (more in future) are immutable images running containers (see CoreOS, Talos).
This is also quite a big price tag for self-service model which offers only access to repository and zero support.
That entry-level subscription does seem like an awful lot of money for not an awful lot of stuff.
So for your $350, you get:
The ability to download the RHEL installer, so you can install the OS. But...
You can only install it on a physical server, and not on a VM...
...and you also cannot install it in a production environment
Access to Red Hat's Knowledge Base
Permission to download packages and updates after you install the OS
And...that's it, I think
So in other words: your $350 gets you an ISO, and the ability to use yum/dnf to install updates and packages after you've used that ISO to install RHEL on the non-production physical server of your choice. And aside from access to Red Hat's on-line docs (which, it has to be said, are generally of very good quality), that's your lot.
That seems a very hard purchase to justify. You could get exactly the same functionality (that is to say, the ability to install and update Linux, whilst receiving no commercial support) by using any other distro you liked at no cost whatsoever. You'd still get updates, and you'd still have no-one to call for help. And you'd be $350 richer for it.
So if you were an individual looking to set up Linux on a single non-commercial server, or a couple of servers at most...I can't imagine why you would actually go for this particular deal. Someone must, presumably, or else they wouldn't be selling it. Unless this purely exists so they can advertise that RHEL starts at $349, to make it sound more appealing initially (until you realise what you get for that money, and that the true starting price is actually $799).
I think there's a lot of reliance being placed on their market dominance and the desire for a standard platform for enterprise applications. "You never get fired for buying IBM" may still be an enshrined in the culture.
That said, Canonical's pricing of full support per host is in the same ballpark and enterprise devs are more used to RH than Ubuntu, so inertia may win out.
