Leaving the sinking ship that is RedHat

The Curious Codex

8 Votes

2024-05-08 Published
2024-07-02 Updated
409 Words, 3 Minute Read

By Adam Jones (Infrastructure)

Adam has been with the firm since 2001.

RedHat in 2024

After a long relationship with RedHat, we're moving everything away for three simple reasons:

Firstly, they pulled CentOS and left many of us who run RHEL in production and use CentOS in development and staging in the crap. We don't want to use CentOS Stream for obvious reaons, and the whole point of CentOS was that it didn't require a subscription and was aligned to RHEL. I do understand that they are in it to make money, but we're not going to pay for maintenance on Development and Staging systems, who would? Ultimately, you can't pull a stunt like this and expect everyone to just carry on regardless.
Secondly, putting their knowlege base behind a pay wall (or forced registration/login) is simply not in the spirit of open-source and Linux. Whilst this decision doesn't affect us immediately, who knows how long it will be before you won't be able to access this content without an active subscription. You know its coming.
Finally, who the hell are trust-arc and why is every RedHat page blocked for 20 seconds with a banner saying it cannot access trust-arc? How on earth do they justify making the redhat website virtually unusuable, and its not just today, its been like this for months already, and without being able to use the site, managing subscriptions has become a pain.

It is unfortunate that a company with such a long standing relationship with the open-source community has decided that its better to alienate a large proportion of their customers, for the sake of the paying ones that remain. We were a paying one, and now we're not. Thankfully, the community responded with Rocky and Alma, both open-source and free to use, and actually in retrospect, I'm not sure what we were getting for our subscriptions.

As a company we migrated our last RedHat Enterprise server over the Weekend of 4/5 May, and its a good thing. We have collectively migrated 35 core servers from RedHat Enterprise 8 and 9 to a mix of Debian 12 and Alma 9.

Linux, should not be a chargable product. Linux *IS* open-source, and RedHat *should* be contributing to that open-source project, and not hiding content away behind login's and blocking servers from updating without valid subscriptions. If you want to charge for 'support', that fine, we do too, but anything else is contrary to the very spirit of open-source software, and Linux.

8 Votes

Comments (1)

Sketchy · 2024-07-02 08:58 UTC
IBM acquired Redhat and Oracle aquired MySQL and they dont do it to support open-source.

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