"Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing."
This is a two-way street. It's not all on Red Hat. I don't know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn't tried to do a deal with Digital Ocean but it's not as simple as Red Hat just deciding to do it. There's a fair amount of certification work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the legal / business agreements.
The "comparable" part exists with many cloud providers, so if you're not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription portability.
However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces friction and for small shops that have a patchwork infrastructure as you describe, it's going to be difficult. Some of that is on Red Hat to solve if they want your money, but not all of it. They can't do it all themselves by fiat if Digital Ocean isn't willing to meet them halfway.
We're not married to DigitalOcean, but changing cloud providers also takes time and investment we'd rather spend elsewhere.
And we'd still have to figure out what to do with the bare metal instances, container images and whatnot.
The friction is very real.
Because they might some day find themselves in a tight spot if all of those open source options have become a half-broken wasteland because nobody invests time/money.
This is a two-way street. It's not all on Red Hat. I don't know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn't tried to do a deal with Digital Ocean but it's not as simple as Red Hat just deciding to do it. There's a fair amount of certification work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the legal / business agreements.
The "comparable" part exists with many cloud providers, so if you're not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription portability.
However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces friction and for small shops that have a patchwork infrastructure as you describe, it's going to be difficult. Some of that is on Red Hat to solve if they want your money, but not all of it. They can't do it all themselves by fiat if Digital Ocean isn't willing to meet them halfway.