[RndTbl] RHEL pulls source code

[Trevor Cordes]

On 2023-06-24 Adam Thompson wrote:
> 
> IMHO, corporate Fedora users are unicorns, or, "it's nice work, if
> you can get it".

Ya, I understand.  Very true.  You need the luxury I have of having a
fleet of Fedora boxes of varying levels of mission-criticalness.  As
such I can upgrade them (whether kernel, or full release) in a staggered
manner, with the less-important ones going first.  Wait a couple of
weeks for pain, and if none, upgrade the next one, and so on.

To be honest I think I've had maximum 2-3 downtime-causing issues in
around 20 years.  Most of those were on Brad's boxes (haha, sorry
Brad), so not very important (haha, kidding!).

> We're now waiting to see if we get the exciting joy of migrating ~100
> CentOS/Alma VMs to another distro, which would easily be a year-long
> project or more.  Oh, or we could just buy RH's Enterprise license
> that provides blanket licensing for<Infinity> VMs for only US$2500
> per CPU socket... that's a really big ouch on a VMware cluster our
> size!

Does RH have an easy method for turning a CentOS install into a RHEL?
Surely, yes?

Is it really that expensive?  Crikey.  So you're saying places running
CentOS on dozens of boxes could be looking at 100's of K$'s a year in
new expense?  Not every place can afford that.

> Bah, humbug.  Post CentOS "acquisition", we all suspected this day
> would come, but hoped it wouldn't.

Ya, in hindsight this was clearly the plan all along.  Worst of all,
they waited until just before summer holidays to foist this on the
world, causing many to opt for the just-pay-us easy-peasy option vs
changing everything to another distro.

In the very short term, if this instantly shuts off all sec updates for
all the RHEL clones, all those distros will have to watch sec lists and
do their own patching.  That should be doable, especially if they
cooperate.

Longer term, I don't see how they don't cooperate to MariaDB-ize the
market.  In that sense this might be the beginning of the end of the
dominance of RH, and in 5 years only the deepest of pockets will still
use them.  The "community" really doesn't take kindly to back-stabbing
and MS-esque domination moves.

I'd say the worst part of this whole thing is the extremely short
notice they are giving everyone.  This is in effect a EOL/EOS
announcement, and usually you get years to plan for such things.