Yeah, but the question is whether such requirements apply to software beyond operating systems.

They might but unless they also come on a supported OS with all the certifications checkboxes checked it won’t even get its foot in the door. It helps if that other software is built on as much of the already supported and maintained set of base libraries.

You can have CIS, FIPS, and a whole host of other compliance without Red Hat, arguably just as easily.

The reality is containers and container-first OSs are killing RHEL, you no longer need a breadth of OS packages or a fully capable OS. Just docker or podman. The only place RHEL has a stranglehold is with COTS apps, but those are all moving to containers too. I can't think of any widely used container that uses RHEL/CentOS or Fedora for the base image, that was a huge miss on RH's part.

That's why they created OpenShift which is arguably worth more than RHEL.

Eh, OpenShift is too opinionated to be valuable for the companies that can afford it, and way too expensive for those that might benefit from it vs a cloud based PaaS. OpenShift's biggest problem has always been that it continues to diverge just enough from vanilla k8s to require "OpenShift specific" shit for everything.

I don't see OpenShift getting the same COTS lift as RHEL, so in my mind it's still going to be a net loss for RH long term as that revenue leaves RHEL and doesn't go to OCP.

This isn’t true at all, openshift is a conformant distro of k8s. You are not required to use any OpenShift specific shit, but what it adds is very nice.

Fwiw, redhat is the creator and maintainer of podman, and it's the only fips compliant container tech out rn.

So containers run on air I take it? No, RHEL isn't being killed, but you're not going to see it as base image for your typical GitHub project. In the enterprise though, where security is tight, no one is going to build containers based on Alpine which is maintained by what, 10 people? Their customers are banks, governments, etc. which will happily pay for what they provide.

> In the enterprise though, where security is tight, no one is going to build containers based on Alpine

:shockedpikachuface:

You would be surprised.

Alpine as a base image is perfectly fine; it is a tiny base system after all.

RH base image is also relatively small (compared to full RHEL system). It is also completely useless, as you cannot dnf install anything while building the image, if you do not have access to RHEL repos. If you have to bring in your own packages, you might use Alpine just as well.

I woould also contest your claim about "happily pay". No, the payment goes after the sales folks do their job, which isn't easy either. There's nothing "happily" about it.

Also that statement is kinda silly "everyone would switch", very broad and sweeping.

That's way easier said than done to convince our clients that "oh yeah, we're using not-RHEL now". We'd have to guarantee some self support to them in that case, in order to alleviate their fears.

Check out https://www.resf.org/ and https://ciq.co/ (founded by Greg Kurtzer) for support and compliance.