> 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support.
I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of the best technical experts.
(Imagine being a huge company with a urgent mission-critical kernel problem: you want to be able to get a Red Hat commando team parachuting in, including a Sr. Principal Engineer who specializes in hard debugging tasks in that vast code base. Not have Bob's Discount Distro's support line be lost after you say you already tried rebooting and reinstalling your global operations.)
At the same time, if anyone distro is rebranding RHEL not just as an open source hippie volunteer thing (that a lot of not-ready-to-pay-for-RHEL smaller businesses use), but also trying to make it a support business out of it, then that might be poking the lion. The hippie commune might get ripped apart in a rampage. Which might be what's happening now?
(Credible support options from AWS and maybe Oracle are a different matter.)
> 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy
Maybe CentOS had been providing this market segmentation with upgrade path to enterprise support, until recently? RHEL is not easy to switch to, and I've had a client that was very capable shop look at switching to RHEL, and nope right back, because they didn't want to learn the new bureaucracy. If they'd been able to use RHEL for free since they were smaller, becoming an RH enterprise support customer as they grew would be easy and a no-brainer.
>I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of the best technical experts.
I support a very large telco company, and they've had a massive effort underway to convert all of their RHEL systems to Rocky (preferred) or Ubuntu because of the loss of CentOS as something they could use on non-production systems plus their (the telcos) financial issues making them look for any software licenses they can abandon. They've replaced thousands of RHEL boxes with Rocky boxes already, all public cloud images must use Rocky or Ubuntu, no RHEL allowed.
The use of RHEL is limited to critical systems like those running an Oracle DB only (and even those they are investigation replacements for).
I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of the best technical experts.
(Imagine being a huge company with a urgent mission-critical kernel problem: you want to be able to get a Red Hat commando team parachuting in, including a Sr. Principal Engineer who specializes in hard debugging tasks in that vast code base. Not have Bob's Discount Distro's support line be lost after you say you already tried rebooting and reinstalling your global operations.)
At the same time, if anyone distro is rebranding RHEL not just as an open source hippie volunteer thing (that a lot of not-ready-to-pay-for-RHEL smaller businesses use), but also trying to make it a support business out of it, then that might be poking the lion. The hippie commune might get ripped apart in a rampage. Which might be what's happening now?
(Credible support options from AWS and maybe Oracle are a different matter.)
> 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy
Maybe CentOS had been providing this market segmentation with upgrade path to enterprise support, until recently? RHEL is not easy to switch to, and I've had a client that was very capable shop look at switching to RHEL, and nope right back, because they didn't want to learn the new bureaucracy. If they'd been able to use RHEL for free since they were smaller, becoming an RH enterprise support customer as they grew would be easy and a no-brainer.
(Docker and then K8s have shaken this up a bit.)