[TriLUG] Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux

[Cristóbal Palmer via TriLUG]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 2:00 PM Maxwell Spangler via TriLUG
<trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>
> I don't know what source you have for 'folks seem to be dropping CentOS
> like a hot rock'.
>

There are a lot of people on this list who may be part of
organizations where conversations about moving away from CentOS may
have been had, but who do not feel free to state publicly what the
specific nature of those conversations was.

I feel comfortable saying that in my corner of my organization we have
in the past used CentOS for prototyping or even for certain production
workloads, since the default production platform is RHEL for us, but
institutional norms and practices make using RHEL for prototyping hard
(in some cases). To be clear, that pattern says more about challenges
we have than about RHEL or CentOS. This move by IBM/RH with CentOS
makes using it as a testbed untenable for us, which has prompted us
not only to drop it, but to revisit other assumptions we've made (such
as how RH would behave under IBM), and to reach out to peers and
colleagues to see what we might do moving forward. We are finding
we're not alone.

I feel even more comfortable saying that I personally have zero
interest in using CentOS Stream for any workloads, and the 16 node
limit for the new RHEL license scheme is irrelevant to me because
under the terms of the license I'd be violating it if I used it for
prototyping workloads for my institution. This whole thing is
frustrating to me, because I've grown comfortable over the years with
both RHEL and CentOS, and it they have their relative merits compared
to alternatives we might choose.

What's fascinating to me is that the new setup feels a lot like the
Sid -> Testing -> Stable model Debian uses. It's just the change, and
what that change suggests about potential future changes, that makes a
lot of people and institutions hesitate.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal Palmer
cmpalmer.org