<story><title>Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avhception</author><text>I would like to add the perspective of a small-business infrastructure guy here.&lt;p&gt;First things first: we&amp;#x27;re a Rocky Linux shop. About 100 instances, some bare metal, some VMs. A few local, a few at cloud providers like DigitalOcean.
Held together by Ansible and kickstart installs.&lt;p&gt;Too often the discussion about RHEL clones like Rocky paints a picture of people like me as freeloaders.
And some of the folks with a similar setup might be.
But most small-time Linux admins I know are real open-source believers.
I would really like to funnel some money into the platform we&amp;#x27;re using.
First and foremost because it&amp;#x27;s the right thing to do, the people writing all that source code deserve it.
But also because we need platform continuity, and being able to open a support case from time to time would also be great.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s really hard. I don&amp;#x27;t have the time and nerves to deal with the RHEL sales department, deal with the licensing, produce my own cloud images because DigitalOcean can&amp;#x27;t provide them, deal with our own internal purchasing process, deal with convincing my superiors that we need to.&lt;p&gt;Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out.</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>Disclaimer:  I&amp;#x27;m a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my own&lt;p&gt;Red Hat, you &lt;i&gt;NEED&lt;/i&gt; to fix this.  I get that it sucks to have your business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of building the thing.  I get that (you think) it&amp;#x27;s going to cause problems for you (it might, I&amp;#x27;m not sure yet).  But you&amp;#x27;re torching an &lt;i&gt;insane&lt;/i&gt; amount of good will that was built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds.  You are making yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend.  You need to stop the bleeding.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have any answers, but I have some ideas:&lt;p&gt;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.  If those don&amp;#x27;t agree, other projects will emerge who &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; agree and will take their place.  Don&amp;#x27;t make their lives unnecessarily hard by throwing up roadblocks in their way.  There will probably be popup companies selling third party support for Alma&amp;#x2F;Rocky etc here and there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a serious dent to enterprise sales.  In fact, I think it helps you by increasing adoption.  A rising tide raises all boats, especially in this field.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;make it easy&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re the same, but a little larger.  Don&amp;#x27;t let anyone convince you you&amp;#x27;re a freeloader.  If you&amp;#x27;re a freeloader, then Red Hat are freeloaders for relying on the Linux Kernel and all the open source software in their distros as well.&lt;p&gt;What we both are are power users that don&amp;#x27;t really need their support.  Our company has an entitlement so we can use the KB articles (to our benefit) and view&amp;#x2F;submit bug reports to them (which is to &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; benefit).  I have no problems telling them that (and for the most part did last week), and if someone on the call were to argue me on that point, I&amp;#x27;d have happily gotten into it with them.  I know they&amp;#x27;re adding a lot to linux and open source, and pay for a lot of developers to maintain and add to projects (including Linux itself), but that&amp;#x27;s just the point, they&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;adding&lt;/i&gt; to something that &lt;i&gt;already exists&lt;/i&gt; that they use.  They don&amp;#x27;t own it, and they can&amp;#x27;t expect to require payment for it.  They aren&amp;#x27;t Microsoft, and the only reason they&amp;#x27;ve ever been able to compete in that space is because they&amp;#x27;re standing on the shoulders of what the open source community has made possible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a symbiotic relationship, and they can mess with it at their peril.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avhception</author><text>I would like to add the perspective of a small-business infrastructure guy here.&lt;p&gt;First things first: we&amp;#x27;re a Rocky Linux shop. About 100 instances, some bare metal, some VMs. A few local, a few at cloud providers like DigitalOcean.
Held together by Ansible and kickstart installs.&lt;p&gt;Too often the discussion about RHEL clones like Rocky paints a picture of people like me as freeloaders.
And some of the folks with a similar setup might be.
But most small-time Linux admins I know are real open-source believers.
I would really like to funnel some money into the platform we&amp;#x27;re using.
First and foremost because it&amp;#x27;s the right thing to do, the people writing all that source code deserve it.
But also because we need platform continuity, and being able to open a support case from time to time would also be great.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s really hard. I don&amp;#x27;t have the time and nerves to deal with the RHEL sales department, deal with the licensing, produce my own cloud images because DigitalOcean can&amp;#x27;t provide them, deal with our own internal purchasing process, deal with convincing my superiors that we need to.&lt;p&gt;Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out.</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>Disclaimer:  I&amp;#x27;m a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my own&lt;p&gt;Red Hat, you &lt;i&gt;NEED&lt;/i&gt; to fix this.  I get that it sucks to have your business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of building the thing.  I get that (you think) it&amp;#x27;s going to cause problems for you (it might, I&amp;#x27;m not sure yet).  But you&amp;#x27;re torching an &lt;i&gt;insane&lt;/i&gt; amount of good will that was built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds.  You are making yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend.  You need to stop the bleeding.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have any answers, but I have some ideas:&lt;p&gt;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.  If those don&amp;#x27;t agree, other projects will emerge who &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; agree and will take their place.  Don&amp;#x27;t make their lives unnecessarily hard by throwing up roadblocks in their way.  There will probably be popup companies selling third party support for Alma&amp;#x2F;Rocky etc here and there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a serious dent to enterprise sales.  In fact, I think it helps you by increasing adoption.  A rising tide raises all boats, especially in this field.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;make it easy&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jzb</author><text>&amp;quot;Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a two-way street. It&amp;#x27;s not all on Red Hat. I don&amp;#x27;t know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn&amp;#x27;t tried to do a deal with Digital Ocean but it&amp;#x27;s not as simple as Red Hat just deciding to do it. There&amp;#x27;s a fair amount of certification work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the legal &amp;#x2F; business agreements.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;comparable&amp;quot; part exists with many cloud providers, so if you&amp;#x27;re not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription portability.&lt;p&gt;However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces friction and for small shops that have a patchwork infrastructure as you describe, it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t do it all themselves by fiat if Digital Ocean isn&amp;#x27;t willing to meet them halfway.</text></comment>