That seems very likely, either for personal preference or for testing the distribution

They didn't purchase licenses. They purchased support.

Yes for 3 workstation, they are probably testing the support

The pdf mentions renewal, so maybe not even that. Just 3 people renewing a support contract.

"The item described in the table below is for the FY23 CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Renewal."

Or possibly a project installed Rocky Linux because it was easier, faster and cheaper than procuring RHEL licenses. It was found in an audit and now they had to procure and switch to RHEL or procure support for Rocky Linux. A complete wild ass guess but I have seen it happen at other agencies with open source software.

Since I retired on Friday, my experience with government IT and procurement is slightly out of date but based upon my knowledge of it until that point I would consider it a better wild ass guess than NASA procured 3 Rocky Linux workstation support contracts to test it before making some agency wide switch.

> installed Rocky Linux because it was easier, faster and cheaper than procuring RHEL licenses

Thanks, I almost spit my coffee.

Some years ago I read some docs on how exactly RHEL licensing works... guess the team which Oraclised MSFT in 2010 moved to RH.

The complications in getting a license that I was thinking of was those imposed by the government procurement process and not Redhat.

Yes, it's obvious, but in essence Rocky licensing is downloading an .iso and reading LICENSE.txt and comparinv this to anything RHEL related is what gave ne a chuckle

Here's how it works (POV NASA/JPL PM of 8 years):

* The institution has a slush / IT fund that provides basic windows laptops or MACs, right off the shelf with lots of security add-ons

* For any non standard equipment or software, the engineers on a project must seek money from the project's budget and justify that cost to the project manager. (not their long-term boss).

* Project managers have a fixed budget based on the proposal they wrote to the funding agency, usually US GOV, with a fixed cost for these kinds of purchases, agreed upon at the time the proposal was funded

* The limited project funds are used to purchase whatever is needed to satisfy the project's objectives. If the project's objectives are not satisfied, the funding agency can stop, or even pull back funding from the project manager

* The approvals for equipment purchases are, at least in theory, given based on merit, which is very often weighed using prior successful proposals. New types of purchases are scrutinized more. If it's traditional to buy CENTOS, then buying ROCKY would be more difficult.

* That precedent is key. Once it becomes clear that ROCKY is being used by successful teams, then the approval process is much easier.

That's why this is a big-ish deal (not huge, but nice to see). Now, people writing proposals and working on projects can point to this as precedent. The best outcome is when funding agencies see "ROCKY is better and more cost effective for the teams we've been funding", then you might get a funder to request that teams use ROCKY as part of the proposal requirements. This is almost nonexistent in federal contracts, but is quite common when dealing with military or commercial contracts.

That, and ROCKY can probably now have a NASA logo on their website under "customers", which adds a bunch of credibility to the project, honestly, whether it's necessarily deserved or not based on 3 desktops.

That sounds a bit more rigid than what I knew to be the case. I think every one I worked with from Goddard had a mac - unless - they specifically asked for something else. That includes both the civil servants and contractors.

Purchases were hard because acquisition was hard but I don’t think the bar requires previous use. Usually getting a vendor to accept a PO was the hard part IIRC

Yeah, as I mentioned below, "Standard" equipment did include macs, and I had a mac myself. I'll edit for clarity.

Ah okay, thank for the that :)

I sort-of assumed that for big purchases it would be a big procedure, as you've stated.

I had it in my mind, there'd be like a lower threshold (i.e. licenses for one or two things), which would go under the radar and just be purchased when someone requested it (or end of year "budget needs to be spend" - you know, that sort of old school "budget per department - spend it or you lose it" sort of thing.) :D

This also went with the idea that the "3 x CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period" would be a small purchase - though of course, I don't _really_ have any idea what this means - could be a massive 24x7 support with 3 Rocky Linux support staff on-call - who knows :)

> That, and ROCKY can probably now have a NASA logo on their website under "customers", which adds a bunch of credibility to the project, honestly, whether it's necessarily deserved or not based on 3 desktops.

This on the other hand is verry interesting!! Thanks for pointing this out :)

Edit: sorry, I misread your comment :( Thought you said their logo _was_ on the Rocky site :P

I've been hearing lately that "buy what you can, build what you must" is the approach to procurement for orgs like NASA and SDA. If it is the case, one would hope this means more folks like ROCKY can get over that initial hump and grow within those orgs. Would be interesting to hear if that mirrored your experience or not.

I'm not so convinced based on my experience. Seems like that could be the ideal, but in practice for such a large institution it seems difficult to implement. Sharing the word that this team over here is using XYZ and seeing good results to that team over there is challenging.

Is this potentially the reason RH won't be providing public sources for RHEL any more? RH's bread and butter is USGOV. NASA using a direct competitor that can only exist by rebuilding RHEL sources, and this use becoming easier isn't great for them.