After the recent events in the last couple of days, with Red Hat essentially saying "We need/want to get paid for the curation and maintenance of the _open source_ packages that we build RHEL with", we have lost faith in the Red Hat ecosystem to use it as the base of our research HPC cluster at a small research group in a University.
Our cluster is currently being re-built with a new chunk of hardware and a big downtime for this upgrade is in a few months. We were set on going with Rockylinux as our base on about 64 baremetal servers doing HPC work. Now, it looks like an unsafe choice.
Paying for RHEL subscriptions is not a real choice as their billing is based on Full time and part-time users with a fixed fee per such user - we deal with a rotating crowd of students and researchers from all over the world. Additionally, we are reliant on grant money that came for research to support the infra on the side. We cannot afford to channel grant money into RH licenses.
CentOS Stream seems to be a silly choice as we were running CentOS 8 all along until Redhat chose to burn it, and we dont want to trust RH again.
Fedora - easier to move to, but being a rolling distribution, it changes too fast for our HPC nodes..
Debian - ideal choice, but would mean need to change everything from our automation scripts, revalidate all our curated software packages to make sure they work on Debian, re-install stuff like SAS, and figure out how.. you get the point.
Folks who are at a similar trouble, which way are you going? Any suggestions for us?
