As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat
As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat cares about us one way or the other, we're too small to register.
Indeed. This is precisely the issue, and RH's recent moves mean a lot of the leeway we might have given in stepping toward that direction now has to be viewed with caution.
* CentOS (along with all firewalled EL derivatives) is free as in speech. * RHEL under this program is free as in beer.
All CentOS (and other EL) users have a vested interest in RedHat Enterprise Linux succeeding and RH continuing as a going concern, but there's a significantly distinct risk evaluation in choosing to deploy official RHEL that there isn't when using a rebuild. It's not a drop-in replacement.
Probably A No Here (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat
Re:Probably A No Here (Score:2)
As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat cares about us one way or the other, we're too small to register.
Indeed. This is precisely the issue, and RH's recent moves mean a lot of the leeway we might have given in stepping toward that direction now has to be viewed with caution.
* CentOS (along with all firewalled EL derivatives) is free as in speech.
* RHEL under this program is free as in beer.
All CentOS (and other EL) users have a vested interest in RedHat Enterprise Linux succeeding and RH continuing as a going concern, but there's a significantly distinct risk evaluation in choosing to deploy official RHEL that there isn't when using a rebuild. It's not a drop-in replacement.