On 2023-06-24 Adam Thompson wrote:
IMHO, corporate Fedora users are unicorns, or, "it's nice work, if you can get it".
Ya, I understand. Very true. You need the luxury I have of having a fleet of Fedora boxes of varying levels of mission-criticalness. As such I can upgrade them (whether kernel, or full release) in a staggered manner, with the less-important ones going first. Wait a couple of weeks for pain, and if none, upgrade the next one, and so on.
To be honest I think I've had maximum 2-3 downtime-causing issues in around 20 years. Most of those were on Brad's boxes (haha, sorry Brad), so not very important (haha, kidding!).
We're now waiting to see if we get the exciting joy of migrating ~100 CentOS/Alma VMs to another distro, which would easily be a year-long project or more. Oh, or we could just buy RH's Enterprise license that provides blanket licensing for<Infinity> VMs for only US$2500 per CPU socket... that's a really big ouch on a VMware cluster our size!
Does RH have an easy method for turning a CentOS install into a RHEL? Surely, yes?
Is it really that expensive? Crikey. So you're saying places running CentOS on dozens of boxes could be looking at 100's of K$'s a year in new expense? Not every place can afford that.
Bah, humbug. Post CentOS "acquisition", we all suspected this day would come, but hoped it wouldn't.
Ya, in hindsight this was clearly the plan all along. Worst of all, they waited until just before summer holidays to foist this on the world, causing many to opt for the just-pay-us easy-peasy option vs changing everything to another distro.
In the very short term, if this instantly shuts off all sec updates for all the RHEL clones, all those distros will have to watch sec lists and do their own patching. That should be doable, especially if they cooperate.
Longer term, I don't see how they don't cooperate to MariaDB-ize the market. In that sense this might be the beginning of the end of the dominance of RH, and in 5 years only the deepest of pockets will still use them. The "community" really doesn't take kindly to back-stabbing and MS-esque domination moves.
I'd say the worst part of this whole thing is the extremely short notice they are giving everyone. This is in effect a EOL/EOS announcement, and usually you get years to plan for such things.