And those conditions are exactly what the OP meant by a licensing game.

There is notting in Jeff Geerling's project list[1] that warrant hundred's of rhel machines and containers at any given time.

Containers are mostly ephemerals when used for build and test purpose.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/projects

The fact that I have to spend more than 5 seconds considering how to integrate my Red Hat Subscription into my test builds (for dozens of projects) means I won't do it.

That's why I stuck with Rocky Linux instead of just dropping all RHEL support entirely.

And there are _a lot_ of test runs where I have more than 20-30 test containers running simultaneously with Rocky Linux 8 and 9.

Do I have to write new software that limits my test infrastructure to only run 16 tests at a time or something idiotic like that? Do I have to even wonder about that using Debian, Arch, heck even Amazon Linux? No.

> The fact that I have to spend more than 5 seconds considering how to integrate my Red Hat Subscription into my test builds

So basically you are saying the author of an ansible book do not care spending a couple of minutes understanding a simple process to automatise it.

Sounds like great advertising for your books really.

FYI containers aren't their own entity for subscription management purposes. A subscribed host can run as many containers as it wants, the host's subscriptions work inside the containers.

(That said I agree that dealing with subscription-manager at all is a lot more annoying than ... not having to do so with RHEL derivatives!)

It’s a fairly recent thing though

It has been a thing for the last 5 years at the very least.

Red Hat recently turned 30 years old as a company.

So yeah, 5 years is pretty recent, unless you started using linux last week.

I said at least 5 years because I know I used it 5 years ago in a previous company and I am pretty sure about it but it may have been earlier.

If you have a source with the original announcement, by all means share it.

EDIT: found an announcement of march 2016 so we are talking +7years at least.

Still fairly recent unless you started using linux last week.

You can also use them for production. Scroll to the bottom of https://sso.redhat.com/auth/realms/redhat-external/protocol/... and follow the link to the terms & conditions:

> The Individual Developer Subscriptions allow you (as an individual, natural person) to use certain Red Hat Subscription Services in connection with Red Hat Software for Individual Development Use and for Individual Production Use subject to these Program Terms at no cost.

> “Individual Production Use” means any use other than for Individual Development Use including, but not limited to, using the Software (a) in a production environment, (b) with live data and/or applications and/or (c) for backup instances

Red Hat also have a no-cost Developer Subscription for Teams agreement for organizations.