CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE SUSE has unveiled a Liberty Linux Lite solution aimed at enticing CentOS 7 administrators facing the impending June 30 end-of-support deadline. According to the veteran Linux vendor, "SUSE Liberty Linux Lite for CentOS 7 is a frictionless solution that provides customers with updates and security patches for their existing …
$25 per server would probably be fine, most people probably only have a few left due to old apps that are non-critical or legacy but they don't want to lose.
$2500 if you just have a single server, well they know where they can stick that as it's litteral "f**k off" pricing.
It's not brilliant value if you just have a single server, and certainly won't work for hobbyists, but for Enterprise IT (and even SMB IT), $2500 for 4 years of security updates and associated support is certainly not *bad* value and worth considering: I've sold some Dell servers where a 1 year hardware warranty extension cost half as much as that which SMB Clients were happy to pay for, as it's cheap compared to the hardware/license/support/downtime costs of replacing that system rather than eking a bit more life out of it.
This is good but unfortunately there's a lot of old code written for CentOS 7 which won't work without major changes on later Linux distros. One of the things about CentOS was the backporting of bug fixes for things like PHP. CentOS 7 uses PHP 5.4 which is different enough to later versions to break a lot of things and that's just one component. It's why many people can't just move things to Ubuntu/Debian etc without significant work or in some cases a complete re-write.
Of course this is a much bigger issue of backwards compatibility, not directly related to Linux and the distros themselves, but this backporting was Redhat/CentOS's most significant feature. With new projects that's less of an issue as other distros now have 10+ year support and no sane person would now use anything connected to Redhat. Also while things like the PHP issue still exist, the issues are better understood. However what was a selling point has ended up being a major trap for anyone stuck using Redhat/CentOS.
1. They almost certainly will be, because of PCI compliance.
2. So what if they're not? Presumably they're on an isolated network, with USB interfaces disabled, etc, etc. So if there's no route* for hackers to access them, what's the risk?
(* Yes, I know there are other ways and with enough physical access anything is possible. This was more of a rhetorical question)
I was wondering under what license SUSE Liberty Linux Lite for CentOS 7 would be provided given most of any distro is GPL?
Presumably SuSE will resort to the same licensing shenanigans as Redhat viz provide sources to customers but restrict its use (including redistribution) by the contract's T&C.
Otherwise one could license 1 (or a 100 :) systems, acquire the distro's sources and create a rebuild, although on second thoughts perhaps that is the reason for the USD2,500 minimum spend. ;)
If I still had a 1000+ CentOS 7 systems I might consider USD25,000/year the least of my problems.
Unfortunately RHEL7/CentOS7 is the last system that a lot of proprietary software runs on.
None of such software has any great merit other than later versions are much worse (unusable), some have a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit binaries and shared libraries, others have binary only kmods for a proprietary isa/pci[e] card that talks to an instrument or tool, and the product is long abandoned and so on.
In many such cases just stripping the distro to the absolute minimum hopefully removing most potential attack vectors, restricting access and further hardening the platform to produce a mostly read-only appliance to do only what is minimally required (and no more) is one reasonable option. From my experience in such circumstances the rare cases of patching security vulnerabilities and rebuilding the few remaining packages (rpms) is not that onerous.
Never forget, companies exist to make money. Personally I don't think this is a terribly bad deal for the head-in-the-sand types that have been asleep at the wheel while IBM steamrollered RedHat rather than planning to migrate when they should have done.
A community/volunteer supported distro is not what many businesses want. Where's the stick to beat someone with if things break? And so there's space for more than one type of operation. No matter your moral qualms about one over the other!
I can assure you the business operators offering such services have no qualms about offering them!
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