RHEL instances in the cloud use the Red Hat Update Infrastructure, so you don’t need a subscription, since the subscription is included in the per hour price.
Wouldn’t they just blocklist you as a cloud customer?
I don’t see how. RHEL provides RHUI to AWS and AWS is the one providing RHUI to the RHEL instances. If it is possible, it would have to be AWS doing some witch-hunt and terminating the RockyLinux account in AWS for some “violation of x y z”.
OK, clear: there is extra effort. And yeah: I do like the RPI images which are not offered by RH. Fair enough. But still “Rocky Linux is an open enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux.” But regarding Rocky as en Enterprise OS “bug for bug compatible”: Rocky is basically a clone. IMHO, the better option would be: “I choose Rocky because they offert features RHEL does not”. Rocky sould be Rocky, not the “RHEL like OS”.
To say that this move by Red Hat is disappointing would be a massive understatement.
@nazunalika this guy @langeman is here to waste your time.
He already posted the same “questions” on Alma forum, got the reply that value of Alma & Rocky is already by filling the gap RH did by killing CentOS.
I suggest to ignore him, in the same manner he ignores constructive replies to his “questions”
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I agree, that’s what Red Hat always said, it’s business was the support it provided, the updates (included with the subscriptions), and training etc. I even found these articles of Jim Whitehurst about CentOS before it changed to stream.
In this one, Red Hat CEO Whitehurst on VMware, OpenStack and CentOS | ZDNET
“CentOS is a derivative of RHEL that works for people that want a stable release without support,” said Whitehurst. “If they don’t see the value of our model then at least I’d rather have them on something similar to RHEL.” -2014
I even recall him saying that even if they start with CentOS, and they will want support they would likely come to RH because of the 1:1 already. They are already familiar with it.
“We release all of our code. Period. There’s nothing proprietary.” -2016
I loved using Cent then Rocky, to learn RH, use it for my cert lessons, and then play with it in my home to use it as I would a client. File server, mail, apache, freeIPA etc. I wonder if Jim hadn’t resigned from IBM in 2021, would any of this be happening? It is sad to see this “Corporate Greed” seep into a once loved company. Sadly it happens all time with acquisitions, or mergers. Telling everyone that nothing is going to change, but slowly after time it does. (Activision and Blizzard) I figured things would go sour, after IBM getting their hands on RH but not this quick. Which does leave me torn, because I’ve always loved RH back in RedHat Linux 5.2 days, before they made it RHEL, and Fedora for the community, but now, it seems their values and beliefs are no longer aligned with the rest of ours. Just because myself and others use RHEL Clones, doesn’t mean we are leeches, I view it we use it to better learn the product, so we can recommend it to to others, and help RH build their business. There are plenty of other devs, on this forum, and other spots, state that they were able to find and submit fixes using Cent or Rocky, or Alma. If this doesn’t contribute in some way?? I don’t know.
Sorry, I didn’t mean for this to go so long… I’ll get off my soap box now, and hope for the best, although I they are have lost alot of trust. So I don’t know.
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I suggest to ignore him, in the same manner he ignores constructive replies to his “questions”. Well, that’s also a way to handle discussions, I did answer but obviously not an answer some peaple like.
For the record, I don’t agree with Red Hat with their decision. It’s wrong and rude to the Open Source community. But that won’t help Alma or Rocky. Become different and independent from Red Hat and Rocky and Alma will live on. I seriously hope they will; I like the choices I can make for an Enterprise OS.
Enjoy your weekend!
Rude truth is better than sweet talk and manipulations, dear @langeman .
You underestimate the average IQ of Linux devs.
Obviously you are here to persuade folks to accept the agenda that Alma & Rocky should separate from RHEL and swallow IBM & RedHat’s long term strategic goal
- to eliminate what used to be CentOS.
This latest RH’s escapade is actually evil to its core, the IBM executives do not get their huge salaries for nothing.
Let’s put that into proper perspective what IBM wants to do with GPL:
IBM wants to turn whole RedHat ecosystem into money making machine where all beta RHEL versions are effectively their R&D department with people in it working for free for their RHEL product.
Make no mistake, it is on this product they are placing now exclusivity, not on the support as it used to be.
Are you trying to sell to the Linux community this new business model deployed by IBM, dear @langeman? So please, stop obfuscating, as the answer is obvious.
I am enjoying my weekend, thank you 
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Some at RH do use sweeter words than the others: The secret behind Fedora, CentOS and RHEL
I’m not sure I still have sweet words about this 
Even then, the rough parity between CentOS Stream and RHEL they’ve described, that article suggests it has only been that way since 9. Given the issue started at 8 when there wasn’t this parity is what caused the existence and Rocky and Alma I think they’re trying to rewrite history a little.
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Here, here! I agree! Perhaps it’s time to create another distribution of Rocky that’s based around Debian and pulls the best of Debian and CentOS Stream together to create something that’s perhaps even BETTER than RHEL! It could be called “DREL” - Debian-Rocky Enterprise Linux.
Once that distro is stable, move Rocky Linux to that or retire Rocky based on RHEL.
Just a thought. Debian is rock-solid, too. Things that you don’t get with Debian out-of-the-box are things like SELinux and FirewallD. Integrating those into a Debian-based Distro and then gathering other parts of CentOS Stream would make for one heck of an Enterprise Distro AND! it wouldn’t be owned by a corporation that could screw the community down the road.
Just a thought.
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There’s no scenario where enterprise customers using RPM distros use Debian or any free-software open-source by-committee distro. Enterprise customers want stability not just in their distro but in the organization behind it. RHEL is the distribution for businesses and they expect there to be a business behind it. If I started talking about the GPL and free and open stuff with a customer, they’d probably drop me. So suggesting that we should all just move to XYZ distro is not a real option.
What do you think would be a real option in this case?
My take on the whole story (on my french blog) : https://blog.microlinux.fr/red-hat-clones/
Just thinking out loud but I can think of two options.
Option 1.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Akamai / Linode, Cloudflare, … all contribute cash to fund an independent non-profit organization responsible for hiring and managing kernel developers and engineers for the purpose of developing and maintaining a business oriented, long-life Linux distribution. The companies that contribute would also receive a proportional amount of VIP support.
Option 2.
Red Hat makes a long term guarantee that RHEL and CentOS Stream will share certain core packages and use the same version numbers (the RPM spec files should be identical) such that any application that uses only these core packages for a particular version of either distro is guaranteed to run on either corresponding version of CentOS Stream or RHEL. So any backport MUST be published in CentOS Stream SIMULTANEOUSLY. They can’t put it only in RHEL first and then CentOS OR the other way around. Or maybe for practical reasons there’s a 24 hour grace period and CentOS doesn’t push stuff until after it’s in RHEL. You can only pull the change explicitly (except for critical security related reasons).
So CentOS would have extra packages that are experimental, they haven’t been fully tested, RH doesn’t want to support them anymore (Libre Office), etc. But you have to enable an extra repo to get them. Meanwhile RHEL would be able to create some separation from the clones. Ultimately I think that is what they really want.
The key here is that most folks will just run the critical shared core packages. In a way, this is even more conservative than using RHEL since it’s a subset of RHEL. But RH would have to commit 100% to keeping these core packages synced perfectly. They cannot release some backport patch for something without releasing it in CentOS Stream simultaneously. CentOS Stream is supposed to be upstream after all. And we don’t have to be guinea pigs for testing their security packages (unless we want to within the 24 hour grace period).
Again, I’m just thinking out loud here but I think there needs to be some kind of compromise. Compromising is critical to actually getting things done and making progress with big problems. And we have a big problem. No doubt.
Personally I would much prefer option 2. Option 1 could be very interesting in that it would be unencumbered by the clumsy procedures and shenanigans of a large for-profit company. An independent organization could have the agility to really innovate. However, this would almost certainly spell the end of RH and, as I’ve said previously, I would much prefer to have a large profitable company behind the big business Linux distro.
If you put it that way, then their options are RHEL, OL, SLES, ?, … but not Rocky, Alma, etc “community rebuilds”.
Thank you for your answer.
I don’t have knowledge enough about the universe of Linux. I also would be happy with the second option though I’m somehow surprised by the way the situation developed since RH decided dramatically shorten the support to CentOs 8 and now this. Don’t look like they are open to negotiate. As a Rocky Linux user I’m very happy how it works and even the faint idea that it could meet the same destiny of CentOs is somehow frightening.
Not entirely sure enterprise customers are that shy about open source that they would drop someone mentioning it. 10 years ago? Maybe. Today, not at all.
After nearly 30 years doing SAP work I can say that this change in direction is a big concern for me. Our company uses the RHEL Developer version for an internal SAP sandbox development environment. We were considering using Rocky Linux 9.x for our next internal SAP S4 2309 (Sept 2023) development environment but now this does throw a monkey wrench into the works.
To the earlier point, stability of the distro is critical. Not only that, SAP publishes optimal RHEL and SUSE setup “notes” for running S/4HANA. If Rocky Linux were to separate from RHEL that would create a problem for a LOT of enterprise customers who might otherwise consider Rocky for internal development environments until those internal solutions are stable or mature enough to go to the full supported version. As we evaluate new SAP S4 versions, or build and pressure test MVP solutions before moving to live customer environments, having an RHEL equivalent distro such as Rocky is really important. For now, Rocky does not offer the SAP-specific RPMs that come only from RHEL (at least I don’t think they do), and based it what I am seeing now it may never happen.
What are the alternatives to RHEL or SUSE (the only two officially supported SAP distros) without Rocky Linux?