There is no CentOS 8, there is only Stream and also this limited no-cost developer thing


Enough sting came from Red Hat's decision to jettison CentOS that Red Hat has backpedaled ... sort of. Instead of reviving CentOS in its prior RHEL-for-RHEL form, however, you'll just get Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself for no money out of pocket, provided you run it on a "small production workload" (16 systems or less, up from the prior single machine limitation) and sign up for the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program. Development teams can also take advantage of the free tier for cloud work. Either way, this "freemium" RHEL becomes available on February 1.

Is that enough? It's not ideal, but it is RHEL and you get it for $0 with a promise you won't become sales call fodder. However, Ars Technica is reporting that annual renewal is required, which doesn't sound that great for people who desire RHEL for long-term purposes (i.e., just about everyone who would use RHEL over CentOS Stream). On the other hand, while CloudLinux's free version now has its new name AlmaLinux, there's no official word yet on whether OpenPOWER is supported and RockyLinux's initial Q2 release will only be ARM and x86. If you're an OpenPOWER shop but the lesser stability guarantees of CentOS Stream really won't work for you, then freemium RHEL may be your only choice as long as your operation is small enough, at least for right now.

Comments

  1. Hello,
    when reading your page, the commercials are often in the background of the beginning of an article. It looks like this: https://ibb.co/dWj0DRM . The text is difficult to read then. Can you change something about that?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This isn't backpedaling. We told you in the original announcement that these free RHEL offerings were coming. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux

    ReplyDelete

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