[TriLUG] Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux

[Sean Korb via TriLUG]

I'm not in a position to do much more than "people are saying" around
using Linux at scale, and I'd note that IBM and Red Hat have shown a
willingness to work with institutions and firms on pricing for
scale-out workloads.  Smaller institutions have HPC needs as well and
will investigate additional OS and container solutions.

While not endorsing or condemning, this is an interesting read and
shows the shape fledgling open source solutions can remain vibrant for
OS based Singularity containers and underlying operating systems.  How
licenses are defended and reshaped in the future will continue to
surprise us and drive unexpected solutions.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/12/21/centos-and-hpc-its-okay-we-are-moving-on/

One of the effects of a "pay at the time of service" model that is
quickly gaining more adoption and draining bank accounts is the
underlying OS will become less visible.  For HPC, shaving small bits
of CPU time off transactions can have enormous effect and the OS will
continue to headline those conversations.

On 1/21/21, Cristóbal Palmer via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 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
> --
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-- 
Sean Korb spkorb at gmail.com http://spkorb.org (est 1994)
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." -P. Picasso