#Redhat linux pricing free#
After 2014: if you want stability and support, please buy RHEL if you don't want to pay, well, there's our fast-moving, free community distro… or, you could have this nice stable distro that's identical to RHEL, and it's free, you just get no support. If you wanted support, you paid for RHEL.
#Redhat linux pricing upgrade#
Before 2014, the positioning was clear: freeloaders got Fedora, and needed to upgrade regularly. This left RH with an odd range of distro offerings. This was, obviously, very good for CentOS – but very bad for the other rebuilds, and as a result, most of them (except Oracle) shut down. Please pay for RHEL for your production boxes, but if you'd rather not, you could run CentOS Linux for nothing. So now the leading freebie was kinda-sorta officially sanctioned. Then in 2014 RH did something very strange: it brought CentOS in-house. Despite them, RHEL has been a huge success – by 2011 RH was the first billion-dollar Linux vendor. Sometimes, RH tried to make life difficult for the cloners, but they survived. This was all fine, clear, and easy to understand. This is often known by the name of its (paid, optional, and significantly cheaper than the official Red Hat Network) support service: Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Oh, and in 2006 that well-known friend of FOSS, Oracle, got into the game by making another such rebuild. You only get official support for one copy, but all the same methods and tools work on all of them. Theoretically, if you didn't want to pay for lots of RHEL licences, you could pay for one copy, get official support for it, but run all your other boxes on CentOS, and save a packet. You could learn using a freebie prototype and test on it, but deploy on the real thing. Whatever fixes RHEL got, soon afterwards the rebuilds got too. Not just the same commands, but the same versions of the same binaries, with the same config files, in the same directories, for perfect compatibility. The idea of these distros is that they are basically identical to RHEL, but with the names changed. The biggest of these, CentOS (Community Enterprise OS), started in 2004. Various third parties started doing this and producing independent distros which were RHEL-compatible, such as Scientific Linux (from FermiLab) and White Box Linux (from the Beauregard Public Library in Louisiana).