Original MuyLinux note
To read J Pomeyrol’s original in Spanish, click here
The announcement of the end of CentOS as we knew it until now did not like anything in the Linux community and good proof of this are the forks that are emerging. But Red Hat has reacted to the storm and has just released a piece of news that, although it will not please everyone, it will satisfy many of the companies and users who relied on the clone to govern their production environments: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will become completely free for development teams and workloads of up to 16 servers.
The news is important both for Red Hat and for a large part of CentOS users, whose support for the stable version will end abruptly in 2021. For Red Hat, because it responds consistently to a change that no one expected and that affects many million users. And it is that the great criticism that could be made to the company is not, as some voices argued, that it takes advantage of its situation to force the migration from CentOS to RHEL and the corresponding license fee, but not the opposite, that the community complains because of greed and because what nobody wants is to pay.
Red Hat had every right to modify the Centos development model as it did. For whatever reasons. What it could not do is leave behind those who depend on the support of the current versions of CentOS, those users or companies that installed CentOS 8 on their servers expecting to receive 10 years of updates that will remain in two. And it won’t.
With the new distribution policy, which will be launched as of February 1, it will be possible to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without restrictions on up to 16 computers, which due to the system’s orientation will be mainly servers, but can also be computers from desk. In fact, this change is supported by developer subscriptions, free for almost five years, but limited to a single job.
As of February 1, therefore, the subscription program for developers is extended at no cost and through it, up to 16 instances of RHEL will be deployed in production, also including uploads to any cloud service provider that offers RHEL. Outside the program is, of course, technical support and extended support, which increases the maintenance of each version of RHEL up to 13 years. The 10 years of rigor, however, are available to any free subscription.
Red Hat has also specified how the distribution landscape looks in terms of supply:
Fedora Linux is the place for major operating system innovations, thoughts, and ideas; essentially, this is where the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is born. " Or as we have called it around here on occasion, Fedora remains what it has always been: the Red Hat testing ground, which does not have any negative connotations in terms of the quality that the system offers.
CentOS Stream is the continuous delivery platform that becomes the next minor release of RHEL." Or what is the same, CentOS Stream will work as a rolling release, similar to what the unstable version of Debian does, but in a more contained way, ideal for testing what the next stable version of RHEL will bring.
And RHEL will continue to be RHEL, the workhorse for production workloads in all types of deployments, with the addition that many more users will now have access to it totally free regardless of the use case.