CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag

CIQ has unveiled a version of Rocky Linux backed by service level objectives and indemnities for enterprises requiring more than the support of an enthusiastic community behind an operating system. Starting from $25,000 for an annual subscription, Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC) retains its compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise …

[EvaQ]

$25,000 for an annual subscription?!

$25,000 for an annual subscription?! For one Linux instance?

Wow! Which target group is willing to pay that? Banks?

Premimum Red Hat Enterprise Linux is US$1,428.90, so just 6% of that CIQ price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

Often just a safeguarding exercise.

Imagine you were the system engineer of a multi-million corporation. If the system went horribly wrong, would you like to take ownership of the blame or just pay a little bit of money to shift the responsibility to an "expert" company instead?

Where I work, we pay a lot for support but rarely use it. But helps us sleep at night ;)

[TrevorH]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

> Imagine you were the system engineer of a multi-million corporation. If the system went horribly wrong

If I were, I'd be paying Red Hat not the monkey.

[karlkarl]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

You are forgetting that Red Hat just repackages code written by us monkeys ;)

[EvaQ]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

I work at a multi-million dollar company, a lot is based on OSS, and I can tell we won't pay 25.000 USD for a Linux instance.

[IGotOut]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

You see the link. Try following it.

"CIQ offers a flat rate for RLC, no matter how many CPU cores, servers, or virtual machines you have. We’ll never count your environments or audit usage."

[RobertCathey]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

RLC is priced at $25k regardless of how many instances are deployed. There are no additional costs or hidden fees.

https://ciq.com/products/rocky-linux/overview/#what-is-the-cost-of-rlc

[CIQ Official]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

Hello!

We would like to clarify this point. The annual subscription price is not just for one instance; it is a flat rate. We will never count your environments or audit your usage.

You can find more information here: https://ciq.com/products/rocky-linux/

Please contact us if you have any questions via our website at ciq.com.

[NickHolland]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

I wonder what the savings on auditing would be for many big companies. I know I've seen a fair amount of people-hours going into figuring out what licensing we need and if we are in compliance with what we have...and projects paused while we try to decide if it is worth extending a license or not. I'm not seeing a ten system company going for this, but I can see a 100+ system company drooling all over it. Even if the cost is a little more up-front, it's paid and done.

Heck, the *ONLY* useful thing my employers ever get out of RH "support" was when their damn licensing code broke our systems. So yes, we were paying (a lot more than $25k/yr) for them to take free code, add run-time restrictions, then fix it when their run-time restrictions caused us downtime or other pain. (to be fair -- I've heard companies with thousands or tens of thousands of RH licenses getting useful support out of RH. That's not my world).

CIQ, you got my attention in a good way. I wish you well.

[AdamWill]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

We do also *write* a lot of the free code in the first place. Then we "take" it, build it all, test it all against each other, and put it through about a zillion government/third party validations you need to have to deploy it anywhere serious. easy stuff, really!

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions

[anderbubble]

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

It's not per instance; it's akin to a site license.

[Me.I.Am]

License availability

"RLC guarantees fast, secure and trusted updates from our Tier 1 U.S.-based repositories. You can pull your updates directly from our servers or mirror the repositories and we’ll never count your systems or entitlements so you can mirror to all of your hosts. It delivers the absolute freedom you expect from open source."

Seems you buy once, use many.

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to sticking with IBM, this is a bit of a bargain tbh. Open source is fine, but sometimes, a company needs a stick to beat people with to get what it needs done, done.

If I were making these decisions, I'd have LONG since have ditched IBM AssRedHat.

[Bill Bickle]

Still seems a bit funky to me...

I feel like as I play back the last 12+months, I have seen the Rocky and CIQ people talk about "saving people from the evil RH who wants to charge money for an Enterprise Linux version, and yet also wanting to charge money for Enterprise Linux support", while also talking about teaming up with Oracle and Suse (who want to make money on software, and in the case of Suse, on Linux software).

So it is a bit puzzling to me how to view both Rocky and CIQ and how to recommend people to use, or not use, Rocky Linux.

It seems like a hard business model to try and sell to those people that don't want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (mainly the CentOS users of the last 15+ years) as the target market. Since they have already stated by actions that they prefer not to pay for Linux.

Based on this I am skeptical of the business viability of the Rocky/CIQ entities, as things don't quite add up in my view.

[Alistair]

RH support levels

I'll be honest, there were not *really* that many instances where I invoked RH support for our fleet, but when we did it *always* got escalated quite quickly, (Thanks to our RH contract support admin, great guy) and at one point we had over 4800 instances, BM, VM, clusters, etc, I know darned well we were *not* paying $4,800 per instance per year, but I know also that $25,000/year would be an absolute bargain compared to what we *were* paying. My question would be how long would it take *these guys* to get a body on the ground at a data center or a command room to do hands on? I know RH managed it twice, in less than 72 hours, and it wasn't an *huge* additional cost. I think we paid for the hotel and the cabs while they were around.

[Bill Bickle]

Re: RH support levels

I am not sure how Rocky or CIQ can actually stand behind indemnification in a meaningful way as a VC backed (and I assume unprofitable, or low-profit) software company. How would they be able to fix any possibly infringing code and what kind of money could they pay to help resolve any damages ?? Feels like a marketing sham thing.

Also skeptical about any claims to offer the ability to patch and updates people's Rocky Linux and somehow keep it all compatible with Red Hat's version. I don't think that story holds water either. I would be leery of buying into the Rocky world, unless you are comfortable moving to a non-compatible Red Hat track over time.

Just saying

[TrevorH]

Re: RH support levels

You did see the bit in the main article that says "Support is available separately." ?

[spuck]

So if I wanted to pay for RHEL, why not just buy RHEL?

I'm really scratching my head: if I wanted the supposed stability and support level that comes from paying for it, why wouldn't I just pay for RHEL?

It can't only be about the flat "site license" of $25,000/year vs. paying for each instance of RHEL, can it?

If I'm a small shop, I would not be able to afford RHEL or this $25,000/year model. If I'm an enterprise player with hundreds or thousands of instances, RedHat would play ball with the pricing and I wouldn't be satisfied with the level of support the $25k would buy me. The licensing fees would take a back seat to stability, reputation, a 24/7 helpdesk, etc.

Help me understand who this is targeting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So if I wanted to pay for RHEL, why not just buy RHEL?

IBM, who are utterly milking it on corp. RHEL support. Those disgruntled with IBM effectively killing Centos.

IBM and reputation are synonymous but not for favourable reasons anymore.

[Bill Bickle]

good comments on the topic on Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/RockyLinux/comments/1fzydxz/ciq_takes_rocky_linux_corporate_with_25k_price_tag/?share_id=E9_dfKOzWiMxW3Nu6Acr5&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

[Bebu]

Kurtzer?

About the time Red Hat/IBM pulled their stroke and the various alternative *ELs were making their pitches I recall reading a blog that looked at that landscape and was wrote a few unpretty things about Kurtzer going back to his time with CentOS but the upshot was that the blogger wouldn't touch Rocky Linux with the proverbial barge* pole.

At the time I was working with RHEL but at home ran CentOS and developer installs of RHEL 7&8 and had AL in a VM.

After retirement not needing support etc I moved everything to AL8 and just run other Linux distros in VMs including RHEL.

One thing about RH support is their list of certified hardware. Running business critical functions on (latest&greatest) gaming kit is more common than one would want to believe. Just the usual absence of ECC ram or non functional EDAC is shudderworthy. Give me middle aged boring Dell etc kit as the BOFH game gives anyone more than enough (unpleasant) "excitment" for one lifetime without dodgy hardware further enlivening the game.

_{* the daft autocorrect wanted a beige pole.}