I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain.

At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it's easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on RHEL+derivs than on other systems. RHEL+derivs is the assumed standard when you talk to firms that make that kind of stuff.

As a result of driver support, redhat derivs became the standard for commercial deployment. Redhat did not get this volume. The deployed volume is with all the Centos/Rocky/Alma that is deployed in hedge funds, prop firms, oil search grids, etc.

As I see it, this driver situation is the real value in the Redhat ecosystem. The userland is a bit of a mess, the package manager does not impress me. But I deploy RHEL-derivs because drivers work with no hassle.

If Redhat were able to cancel the derivatives, they would trigger the tipping point where industry ceases to treat RHEL+derivs as the standard driver target. Firms using centos on five thousand servers are not suddenly going to start paying USD 350 / year / server where previously they paid nothing. They will move to Debian, and eat the pain of the transition. Commercial driver culture would swiftly follow. That culture change would not take years. It would take days.

I think Redhat's per-server sales model is naive. USD 350 / year gets you a license with no support. This probably gets some commerce from small-business, and a bit more from firms with traditional service expectations.

But is that really where the opportunity is?

When I set up a data-centre presence, I want to PXE-boot each server. This way I can modify the system image for the grid by creating a new PXE image and rebooting hosts. Getting to this setup is fiddly. I wish there was an off-the-shelf solution from Redhat that did a good job of it. USD 2000 per year per site per 100 servers, including support for the PXE device itself. Redhat could coexist with the derivs if it took this path. If they built this as an appliance, that product could become ubiquitous like firewalls and network switches.

This is like the tech communities version of the Ellen drama. Ellen is far from the worst person in Hollywood and Red Hat is far from the worst ISV, but because they’ve built their image on being the “good guy” anything they do contrary to that elicits a strong emotional reaction.

No, it won't unless the customer is also using upstream stuff elsewhere. But it will close an avenue of new customer acquisition. Can't say how often, but it happened that someone needed support for an upstream software (which is a big no-no) and ended up buying a downstream license.

> a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community

So what? There is no obligation to contribute back in any way.

To quote Jeff:

> Here's how it used to work:

> Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux

> They would release a new version.

> They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch

A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Hat no longer does any RHEL development behind the corporate firewall, and does everything out in the open in CentOS Stream. There is one caveat for security CVEs, but effectively those go into CentOS Stream and RHEL at the same time when the CVE embargo expires.

What this comes down to is wilfully ignoring CentOS stream. All the clones of RHEL can simply track CentOS stream, and even replicate all the "Secret Sauce" that is the CentOS Stream CI/CD workflow. The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.