RHEL

The Rocky project’s other workaround uses RHEL VMs on pay-per-use public cloud providers. Those cloud VMs run full, complete RHEL instances. Rocky’s continuous integration system can start a RHEL instance in the cloud – thereby making them Red Hat customers, at least briefly – using that instance to fetch all the new or changed source packages and post their contents to the Rocky Git servers, then shut down and delete the VM… at which point, the ownership – and the license agreement – are terminated.

Okay, this is just getting silly…

[ full article: https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/04/rocky_linux_rhel_loopholes/ ]

Well, that’s… novel.

I actually had to fight to hold back my laughter while reading that in a quiet office.

I gave up on RHEL years ago, perma-stale was the best way to describe it, and who can forgive then for foisting systemd and Poettering’s other atrocities upon us.

I gave up on RHEL years ago

Same. I have worked on a RHEL derivative Linux Distribution for years. I was the architect and the main developer. We had to use RHEL because of customer’s requirements, not for our own desire.

First move was to completely remove their kernel and restart from Vanilla + our own patches for the specific task, while we left the user-land RHEL (plus added our on specific tools on top), so customers with certified RHEL personel would be able to use our Linux straight out of the box.

RHEL has ALWAYS demanded to rebrand a down-stream distro, this is nothing new, never liked or helped down-stream distro makers (that youtuber that started all of this drama, probably doesn’t know how RH actually worked for many years).

According to a recent RH’s statement, they liked our approach (they cosider free-loaders only the ones that do not change the kernel etc), but still, their procedures to rebrand were broken, some patch/code was badly documented, sometimes they just refused to fix some security issue out of nowhere so we had to constantly check their Bugzilla to ensure we would fix what they would not. Their back-porting stuff to a kernel was a nightmare (especially before RHEL 7) hardware companies like the one I worked for at the time.

If we could have chosen, we would not even have considered RHEL tbh, but oh well.