What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro market. Kill them off and it will become a technical backwater, all the small and medium users will go somewhere else and there will be no on-ramp for new customers (as Red Hat is too technically different from what they have). It can take a while, they might get RHEL for their old systems but they'll go SUSE/Debian/Ubuntu for new stuff.
I'd say that they are literally doing what Travis CI and other companies have done in the past, they have no vision of growing their market anymore, now its all about cost cutting and squeezing the most out of their existing share while the music is playing. So no, I'm not angry about it, but on the other hand I can't see it as anything but a sign of irreversible decline.
1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there.
2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue.
3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu.
While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.
(I have no personal experience trying to run anything like this, this is purely citing a previous comment made.)
Non-RHEL hosts are only supported is Red Hat has someone to talk to at the vendor or cloud provider, so that they can debug stuff that breaks only in their environment and can't be reproduced. This is done to cannot guarantee the level of support that customers expect but very few cloud provider can provide that. I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list.
On other unsupported hosts we will ask the customer to reproduce on a supported host if we think the host is the culprit.
Probably not https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-servi...
Best damn business innovation ever, renting people shovels to dig themselves a hole with!
We had Oracle databases running on Oracle Solaris running on Oracle SPARC servers, because the bosses were convinced of the synergies. When the problems started (with Solaris zone clusters) it was a happy merry-go-round of fingerpointing between Oracle support groups.
Oracle is on a rather short list of companies I'll try to avoid doing business with if at all possible.
Red Hat is more profitable than ever. It's about wanting EVEN MORE.
I don't think anyone is particularly surprised, or will miss them much. It's just kinda sad to see what was a reasonably happy opensource success story end with a giant corporation shutting down some of their releases out of protectionism.
If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from thr pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.
It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
Either you don't understand what CentOS stream is, or you're being ridiculously hyperbolic.
It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).
Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.
It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.
It used to be worth it for 20+ years. Now something changed.
For my servers I used to use 95% centos, 5% rhel. Now I’ll use 0% rhel.
I didn’t need support for most servers but I liked having comparability for when things grew into needing it.
RH doesn't understand this.
If you accept that it takes a lot of effort to produce what Red Hat produces and you accept that you cannot buy food with a list of your open source contributions, then the people who work for Red Hat need to be compensated in some way.
If your answer to this is that there is a big, distributed pool of people willing to do this work instead of Red Hat then you don’t believe that Red Hat adds value. But the question remains: who compensates those people?
And this big distributed pool of people ready to do free work definitely doesn’t exist already. Well, it does, but it’s just Redhat. And they are rightfully changing that.
It could be the companies they work for (like is done with the Linux Kernel), but that doesn’t exist and starting it is a pretty big undertaking.
At the end of the day the comment in the post about the anger coming from people who “do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit” rings pretty true.