
No-Cost RHEL Developer Subscription Now Available - palebluedot
http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/
======
EwanToo
The developer program agreement forbids you from using this for test or
production installations [1]:

"By participating in the Program and accepting these terms, you represent that
you will be using the Red Hat Subscriptions(s) for development purposes only,
and Red Hat is relying on your representation as a condition of our providing
you access to the Subscription(s). If you use the Red Hat Subscriptions for
any other purposes, you are in violation of Red Hat’s Enterprise Agreement set
forth below and are required to pay the applicable subscription fee"

1 - [http://developers.redhat.com/terms-and-
conditions/](http://developers.redhat.com/terms-and-conditions/)

~~~
nxzero
Right, that's by definition what a "developer license" means; realize that
this may not be common knownledge, but comment reads to me as if this was some
form of trickery, which it clearly is not.

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vollmond
Though I am surprised to see "test" not included in the dev license. Aren't
they usually lumped together?

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mkj
Maybe they are worried about perpetual beta sites.

~~~
jdmichal
If it's externally accessible to customers, it's production. Whether you call
your served content beta is irrelevant.

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cyphar
On the SUSE side, you can get OpenSUSE Leap which is a clone of all of our
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) packages that are kept up to date with SLE. It
also has a bunch of community-maintained free software packages not available
in SLE. And yes, it's all free as in speech and beer. And no EULA.

~~~
embik
How does "uses SLE packages" and "kept up to date" work together? I'm
seriously confused because that seems to be exclusive to me. For example, an
more up-to-date kernel package isn't really derived from SLE anymore then,
right? And how can a developer be sure his software working on openSUSE Leap
is running on SLE when there _are_ different packages? That's what this post
is about, kinda.

The more apt Red Hat equivalent seems to be Fedora here, which is 100% free as
in speech & beer as well. Or CentOS, if we're talking about developing
Enterprise software. It's a binary-compatible RHEL rebuild after all.

~~~
cyphar
Well, the reason that Leap 42.1 has a 4.x kernel is because the next service
pack of SLE is planned to have a 4.x kernel as well (at which point, from my
understanding, they'll sync up). The reason they didn't just use the SLE
kernel is because of hardware support.

But the rest of the packages are either:

1\. Directly from SLE, meaning that they have the exact same version, patches
and build setup (they're rebuilt on the External OBS though). These are kept
up-to-date with maintenance releases for SLE (which is what I meant by "up to
date").

2\. Community-managed, meaning that they were not available in SLE and the
community added them.

Admittedly, the kernel is the one case I know of where this is not the case.
CentOS might be comparable, but I don't know whether or not RedHat actually
contributes to CentOS (we contribute to OpenSUSE).

~~~
krylon
> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS

Not sure if that counts, but they hired a few of CentOS's core developers a
while back (one or two years ago, I think), explicitly to make communication
between RHEL developers and the CentOS people easier/faster. CentOS remains
what it was before, but Red Hat now pays a few people to work on it full time.

~~~
embik
CentOS is actually an official part of Red Hat by now[1].

[1] [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-
and-c...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-
join-forces)

~~~
krylon
Thanks for the link! I was not sure how far their involvment went beyond
springing for the developer salaries.

------
0x0
EULAs on Linux, while MS goes MIT, all in a day. Interesting times indeed.

~~~
pritambaral
I can still install the exact same software as Red Hat Linux – except for a
difference in name only – in the form of CentOS, for free, both as in beer and
speech.

I still can't install MS Windows for free or without EULA.

~~~
pjmlp
I can.

In Germany EULA don't have legal value.

Actually in most European countries, if you only get to read the EULA after
paying, it doesn't have legal value.

~~~
pritambaral
I was speaking in the context of my parent post.

It is good to know there is some legal haven where post-transaction EULAs are
disregarded, though, thanks.

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speeder
I wish this would spread more.

For example currently noone submit community made patches of SimCity 4 to
SimCity 4 forums, because the EULA forbid it, and Electronic Arts DID
contacted forum owners about it, saying that if they allow SimCity 4 patches
in their forums and sites, the EULA will get enforced and they will get sued.

Even discussing making a community patch for SimCity 4 get you banned on those
forums...

I am very sure that if EULA were non-enforceable in the entire world, people
would start patching SimCity 4 to work properly on new computers in 6 months
at most.

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jdmichal
That makes no sense, except from an overstepping-legally-and-relying-on-
unsophisticated-second-party point of view. How is a _forum_ in any way bound
to the _game 's_ EULA? As a trivial point, let's say the forum is owned by a
company. So EA is going to sue the company for breaking terms in the EULA of
its game? How did the company become beholden to those terms in the first
place?

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mindrunner
I think this is RH finally realizing why Ubuntu Server has surpassed them in
the cloud. It's because develop & test on the same OS. Its also the reason why
CentOS was popular in the first place.

This coupled with faster but unsupported software version updates should put
but back on track to compete in the cloud.

~~~
ams6110
CentOS has let you do that for a long time.

The whole point of RH/CentOS is it's the distro for people who specifically do
NOT want a lot of churn in software versions.

I install RHEL on production servers because I'm much more confident I can run
"yum update" and nothing will break.

~~~
wanda

        I install RHEL on production
        servers because I'm much
        more confident I can run
        "yum update" and
        nothing will break.
    

Similar rationale for my using FreeBSD.

~~~
lukaslalinsky
Excluding ports, right? Those break pretty often.

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mkj
Does this give access to the Red Hat support website? Some of the notes on
bugs/workarounds there are useful, but subscriber only.

~~~
davidmichael
After creating a developer account and logging in I still do not have access
to the subscriber knowledge base.

~~~
etcet
I was able to log into the knowledgebase (e.g.
[https://access.redhat.com/solutions/412643](https://access.redhat.com/solutions/412643))
using my new developer account. Working in a CentOS shop, this has made my
week!

~~~
lst68
I can also access the "premium" resources using my new account, however, on my
first attempt I landed on my profile page asking for further details (address,
phone number). Having completed my account I can read e. g. "verified
solutions" I definitely couldn't access previously.

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bradenb
Over the last few days at Build, Red Hat had been making a big deal about
"loving .NET." I wonder if this move is driven entirely by the desire to be
the go-to destination for .NET Core on Linux.

EDIT: I saw this announced by Red Hat during a .NET session and they were
giving out flash drives with the image.

~~~
krylon
I could imagine Red Hat having lots of customers that would like running their
.Net applications on Linux, so it makes sense for them.

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bpye
I am curious, what does this give you over CentOS, I thought the idea of
CentOS was that it was RHEL with different support and branding?

~~~
Zathrus1
CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL. While it's rare, there are some bugs that creep
in during that process. It also doesn't have a few other things that RHEL does
- mainly the -supplemental repo (closed source 3rd party software, the most
important of which is probably Oracle jdk in rpm form), a working yum-security
module, and a slightly different update mechanism (both are yum, but if you
are creating some mass deployment system then having subscription-manager is
important; this is really edge case-y though).

And to be very, very clear - Red Hat does not support CentOS. Some of the
CentOS devs are paid by Red Hat, but if you open a support ticket for it it
will be closed very quickly. You cannot pay Red Hat for commercial support of
CentOS in any way.

~~~
joombaga
To invert the question then: Why, now, would I choose CentOS over RHEL with
this new free development license?

~~~
rilindo
You would choose CentOS if you need to run enterprise-level software (example,
Oracle), but you can't pony up the operational money to buy Red Hat Enterprise
Linux licenses on your server fleet.

~~~
caf
If you can afford Oracle licenses, RHEL licenses are a rounding error.

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dfc
I have never totally understood the difference between redhat server, desktop
and workstation. This program grants access to redhat server. Does this mean
that you can not use this to develop something for Gnome? The way I understand
the differences between the variants in order to do Gnome development you
would need to use Workstation, which is Desktop plus development tools.

~~~
Zathrus1
No, desktop and workstation are just stripped down versions of Server (with
occasional really weird exceptions like the packages to burn a physical CD or
DVD are, only in those two in RHEL7).

Server has a LOT of packages that the other two do not as well. Really, Server
is what you want.

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gorkemcetin
If you cant fight with free but unsupported, be free and unsupported. :) I was
expecting this for quite some time.

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jaegerbombb
What does this mean for red hat and the ecosystem of linux distros (eli5)?

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smashed
This almost looks like RH catching up to MS. Sad.

