NB:  "We" below refers to the Arstechnica persons.  The solution below 
seems to be at no cost, but will not address a university, CERN, 
Fermilab, etc., multiple copy deployment as this exceeds the IBM RH "no 
fee" limit.  Presumably there is some mechanism to prevent no fee use of 
the deployable RHEL distro for too many instances per site.  Would Epel, 
ElRepo, etc., be supporting the distro below as was the case for the 
various EL non-RH distros (such as SL)?  Does anyone know additional 
details, etc., beyond what appears below.

 From the Arstechnica URL: 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__arstechnica.com_gadgets_2021_01_centos-2Dis-2Dgone-2Dbut-2Drhel-2Dis-2Dnow-2Dfree-2Dfor-2Dup-2Dto-2D16-2Dproduction-2Dservers_&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=5UNRADR6PpQVqP97Jl4VT9V4oTZCHRSZp5Php98SpHI&s=HmS-gVxXfw2RalHvyfiHtb9c1M1J1HQ20J613PRjRDE&e= 

Considering the previous public outrage about CentOS 8's early demise, 
we reached out to Red Hat for clarification regarding availability 
guarantees—specifically, whether any guarantee was given that the terms 
of the free small-production use will stay valid for the length of 
general support for the RHEL version they cover. After some 
deliberation, this was the official answer:

A Red Hat subscription gives you access to all available versions of Red 
Hat Enterprise Linux except for those in extended support. This access 
ends when the subscription ends, as does access to all related 
documentation, support, services, patches, etc., so it’s important to 
think about the subscription separately from the platform.

The Red Hat Developer program isn't a fly-by-night or quickly-produced 
program; it has existed since early 2015 with multi-system deployments 
supported from 2018. The big change today is that now a small number of 
production systems can now be included under the subscription for 
individuals, but the program itself is tried and true. We've never 
removed anything from the program, only added to it, highlighted by 
today's announcement.

The Individual Developer subscription is currently set up as a one year 
subscription. Renewals will be a simple process as close to "clicking a 
button" as possible. We have no intent to end this program and we’ve set 
it up to be sustainable—we want to keep giving the users that want to 
use RHEL access to it. The primary reason we need a subscription term is 
because it is legally difficult to offer unlimited terms globally and as 
new laws come into effect, for example GDPR, we need to be able to 
update the terms and conditions. This is similar to how our customers 
buy Red Hat subscriptions for fixed terms, not in perpetuity.

Our intent is to keep small-production use cases as a key part of the 
Red Hat Developer program and the Individual Developer subscription to 
help bring enterprise-grade Linux to more users.




On 1/20/21 9:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 12:12 AM Serguei Mokhov <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-rhel-is-now-free-for-up-to-16-production-servers
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> --
>> Serguei Mokhov