@mcdanlj Made me think of you.
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Yeah, I definitely have some interests here. 
I haven’t watched this video, but yeah I’ve been following the overall story with interest. Jeff is really really angry about this change and has been super clear that he’s going to do everything in his power to hurt Red Hat as a result.
Maker Forums (both Discourse and Mastodon) runs on top of AlmaLinux 9, so we’re vaguely impacted by this kerfuffle, or at least interested. I think it’s going to sort out in a bit.
The reason we’re not on CentOS Stream in the first place is that when this was set up, I didn’t have console access to easily recover in the incredibly unlikely case that a new kernel wouldn’t boot when I reboot the system. Now I do! So if I were setting us up from scratch today it would be on CentOS Stream in the first place. (Ironically, I could move us to CentOS Stream with a tool maintained by Alma — ELevate.)
While I think that Mike McGrath made some real unforced errors in communication, the bigger picture is that I don’t think folks have any idea about why RHEL is actually high quality. People keep saying “QA” but that’s simply not it. QA is important but isn’t actually the primary feature that provides this stability. It’s the process and they’ve improved that since I was there — and it was good then. The value of the RHEL point releases over CentOS stream is guarantees about not breaking third party, mostly proprietary code. The “oh, we didn’t realize your code depended on that bug” problem is far more prevalent in proprietary code, intrinsically, by the nature of not being able to see that source code. In general, CentOS Stream is making controlled change and the ability to update ahead of the point releases is probably actually better for security.
CentOS Stream is a lot more like the OS that I built at rPath, rPath Linux, where we built very strong process that delivered quality. We didn’t do a great job of selling and that business hasn’t existed for a long time, but the technology was wonderful, and one of the complaints I’ve seen on the Fediverse threads is a wish that the technology we had built to do that, Canary, hadn’t lost and been abandoned…
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There may be some failures to update CentOS Stream in practice — Re: CentOS Stream, RHEL, and Fedora [was Re: What is Fedora?] [LWN.net] — and those are considered bugs at Red Hat.
Honestly, if I wanted, I could register a Red Hat Developer license and run RHEL here. It’s not like I need more than 16 free (gratis) licenses to do that. I just don’t know of a need.
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Thanks for the background information. I knew you would have more of the handle on the reality of what is at the center of the real issue here.
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@mcdanlj this might be relevant 
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Drama aside, I can’t get a good feel for how much the distros downstream from RHEL actually take business that would be Red Hat’s. My impression had been that the people using Alma and Rocky generally weren’t the kind of customers who would consider paying for RHEL licenses but this move makes me question that impression.
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That’s my thoughts too but also that if they offshoots were closer to RedHat then it would be easier to growing businesses to become RedHat customers rather than walk on the edge of community support.
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I think there is a low frequency of high volume replacement usage.
So I think the vast majority of users are like Maker Forums, but I don’t have a good sense of how that maps to number of systems.
Red Hat feel like they are leaving lots of money on the table from large clusters, and large cluster operators are confident they wouldn’t pay that much money because they don’t have it…
I don’t like what Red Hat chose here, and I also get annoyed when people hold them to a different standard than competition. Screaming about this while giving their competition a pass for never having been this open in the first place and still not being as open as Red Hat is still being. 
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True. If MSFT or Apple announced that they were going to be as open as Red Hat is then it would be a huge improvement.
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