I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain.
Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.
I think it's hilarious that so many run CentOS instead of RHEL. Redhat has managed to make their product worse than free with their licensing bullshit.
If I were a large enterprise I'd reconsider CentOS. RedHat's lack of a commitment to the customer's experience in favor of RH's personal design preferences smacks of Oracle-ism. Anything they develop they immediately force on their users, and you have to just accept it rather than use it optionally. It's less easy to get away from those kind of changes versus something more open like ubuntu/debian (and I have no love for debian). And then there's the whole secret kernel patches and backported "features"... Then again i'm a dirty hippie who prefers Slackware, so maybe i'm too Linux-libertarian for today's enterprises.
CentOS/Redhat used to be a classic Unix server version (up to around CentOS 6) and most sysadmins using it didn't care about alsa/pulseaudio/X/Gnome/usb/hotplug. systemd changed that, and CentOS is pretty weird now.
Ubuntu was a notebook-focused end-user distro. Not sure what it is in 2020.
If you never used early Linux or Unix distros, then Ubuntu might seem normal and you wouldn't notice the differences that I'm referring to.
People pay for Redhat if they're using commercial software and want support, like ERP software. The reason for that is since Linux doesn't have an Application Binary Interface (ABI) standard, commercial vendors can only support specific versions.
Top500 cluster owners were pissed when Redhat started charging per server and wouldn't give them a break, despite operating clusters of thousands of cookie-cutter servers.
I forget if I wrote a post on how shitty Linux is compared to any other OS, but the missing ABI and horrific help/man/info situations would be top of the list.
(You know if you're a linux expert and not a fanboi when you can list 10 things that linux completely sucks at.)
But RedHat is painfully license driven. So much so, that even if you pay for RH, you would be tempted to use CentOS just to avoid the annoying tooling and infrastructure that RH has built to do license checks.
Redhat earns billions by selling downloads and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Centos was a highly compatible equivalent of RHEL, available without any hassle.
Redhat then decided that Centos would become a beta test distro with newer software then RHEL, probably including more bugs, incompatibilities and new things that users and admins need to learn.
Rocky linux and Alma Linux then became the main options for people who want a Redhat-derivative distro.
CentOS users are primarily deadweight loss- they couldn't afford to pay RedHat if it didn't exist. On the other hand, its existence, popularity, and the fact that it's identical to RHEL except for the logos means that people make sure their programs work on RHEL.
I have never worked at RedHat, but it was founded by and is run by Linux and GPL enthusiasts. Unencumbered redistribution of the software is the goddamn point.
> i worked in many different companies, and all of them used centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA.
I worked on a product that allowed both RHEL and CentOS, and then moved to a different one that mandated RHEL with a supported contract. The latter was far less stressful to deal with, because any time there was an OS issue, we could pretty easily tell them, "Go to Red Hat." The shops that were on CentOS on the other product tended to be small businesses (and cheapskates), and every time an OS issue arose, it was a screaming match trying to convince them that we're not going to fix their OS for them.
Very few people use Red Hat (RHEL) as a desktop. It simply gets outdated and has (intentionally) very long release cycles. Most Red Hat shops I have been part of use Fedora for the desktop, and ship the RHEL/CentOS on the server.
RHEL (CentOS) is only a small piece of what Red Hat offers. If all you want is a base RHEL system (that can be a week or two behind on non-security patches but is otherwise the same), and you don't need any support, then yeah I'd do that (and I do in fact. I use CentOS for personal stuff all time). Since all of Red Hat's stuff is open source, you could install them all individually just fine. I think of Red Hat as more of a competitor to cloud companies than to Linux companies. A lot of what we do is help people build their own private clouds on the hardware they own. RHEL is at the foundation of course, but RHEL is very rarely the end goal of the customer.
If you are doing this at scale, you're going to end up paying way more in salary to employ people to do it than you would if you just went with Red Hat support. And since early in an effort you need more people, you would either have to lay people off or find new jobs for them.
I often swoop in and knock out tasks in hours that would take the company's infrastructure/SRE teams days or weeks to do, because I've done it a lot and I know what I'm doing. Its also less likely that I'll make a configuration error that exposes itself in prod, simply because I've already made those errors in the past and learned from that mistake. And when I do screw it up (which is a very, very, rare occurrence ;-) ), the company isn't scrambling to fix it. They call up support and we get it fixed ASAP. Again it's not for everyone, but it is for some people. I usually find that buying Red Hat saves a lot of money rather than costing money, which is why so many big companies do buy us.
This article is actually very good at explaining exactly what is it Redhat is doing and why. And I find myself in agreement with author's conclusion.
I started my Linux journey with Redhat Linux 5.1 (Manhattan) I got on CD-Roms in a paper computer magazine. This was in late 90s long before anyone came up with the name "red hat enterprise Linux". Red Hat was the distribution that took Linux and packaged it and a huge library of software on cd-roms. It was free. It was popular. It brought Linux to the masses including to myself. Also it provided tremendous value to people like me(at school at the time) who couldn't even afford Internet access at home. It gave me access to a huge library of quality open source software for free which was a basis of my first tiny side IT business (small office servers and support) that meant I could now afford to buy better hardware, dial-up for as long as I wanted and eventually a 128kb DSL line to the internet. When RHEL came out with their licensing I considered it a sort of "step back" towards the "old" paid software business model. I didn't like it at all. I turned away from Redhat for many years favoring Debian.
Forward a couple of decades later, and I'm no longer doing small office servers as a side hustle, but I'm working full time consulting for fortune 500 companies. In this environment RHEL is seen as a safe choice. Whenever an important physical linux system is deployed it's running RHEL and it is fully licensed with best support. I can count on fingers of one hand the times my employers actually used RHEL enterprise support during my entire career, but they still paid for it. Why? Because it limited the risk. What about dev, and test systems? What about VMs no one really cared about? All of them run CentOS. Why? So people that run these systems that didn't have to be so highly available could use the same tools to manage them. So we would know if something worked on CentOS it would probably work on rhel due to same versions of software etc. It was neat, but I'm sure it really cut into RedHat's bottom line. Consider that Microsoft was paid for every single server, regardless if it was just a developer sandbox or a highly available email server. Also MS made you pay for support for all of them. Yes, you could have different levels of support for various servers, but beyond certain numbers of servers/users the only way to buy MS software was with very expensive support. Using Linux in general was seen as a money saving method precisely because CentOS was available for less important stuff and you could buy RHEL for production systems. In a way CentOS was a marketing vehicle for RHEL.
But about 5 years ago this has started to change. More and more big companies I worked with moved to "the cloud". Although you could use rhel there, almost no one did. AWS had their own distro of Linux(based on rhel too) now that too was seen as a safe choice. Also, containers, autoscaling, ease of provisioning and general robustness of Linux in general created an environment where the value of rhel support to businesses was much lower. Cloud technologies have seriously started eating Redhat's cake in large companies IMO.
So RedHad had to do something to stay afloat. And they did. Is it enough to save them? I don't know, but for sure they don't deserve the hate they get for it.
Would I recommend Rhel to anyone other than a huge business that can absorb the cost? Of course not.
To those wondering, I think that Red Hat doesn't make that much money from SELLING RHEL. It's the support, certifications and those things that are making Red Hat's budget. So CentOS and RHEL aren't really competing products. But Red Hat can now offer support even to CentOS customers.
The thing is, I'm not so sure RedHat actually lost revenue over CentOS. The people who want to use CentOS is a very different type of userbase than the people who would use RedHat/RHEL, and the CentOS people would simply choose Debian or something else over RedHat.
From purely a business perspective I think the entire thing naïvely makes sense, from a far-away view without much knowledge of the business space. But once you look a bit closer I don't think it does.
Well, unnecessary complexity full of YAGNI is exactly what the E in RHEL stands for. Red Hat products need to be complex enough so that somebody will pay for support. :)
I can't help but feeling for the a huge swath of the intended audience this is much too late. I remember the cachet of using RHEL over something like CentOS 3-5 years ago but now it seems like any operations team I come into contact with is fine the Ubuntu Server and call it a day?
For everything RedHat has done for open source, in my mind rightly or wrongly I associate them more with sales force or oracle rather than a quasi benevolent champion of FOSS.
On top of this I also believe that companies prefer the RHEL opinionated implementation of a linux system vs Debian's.
RedHat is a company that sells to other companies. Therefore it has to implement their linux and make decisions in a way that works well with how other enterprises think. Big companies aren't comfortable depending on "the community" to do the right thing for them.
Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.
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