Licensing issue with Red Hat Subscriptions

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I would like to know how the terms of subscriptions work on any developer subscriptions(including paid and no-cost) for the following cases:

  1. Hardware development.
  2. General computer science research and experiments when the report is the main aim rather than the actual software code involved.
  3. A developer using the same machine as personal computer for his/her own private non-commercial things. (using other CentOS loses the devtools channel for development purposes and self-supported production does not provide devtools, or possibly can't mix subscription variants to stay within the support terms).
  4. Merely using RHEL to run software development tools but the target of the code is not a PC/server which has nothing to do with RHEL.

Responses

Hi Kwong Hei Tsang,

Check out the Red Hat Developer's Terms at this link https://developers.redhat.com/terms-and-conditions/.

You mentioned...

  • Hardware develoment, so development is development. At the Red Hat Developer Program instructional for installing Linux https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/hello-world/, they have 5 case uses, 1) Bare Metal 2) Hyper-V (ugh) 3) KVM 4) Virtualbox 5) VMware. So pick the one you wish.

  • Your #2 above, they don't constrain against specifics, they just say use it for development, not production use (see my link at the top).

  • Your #3 above, my own take (and this is by no means authoritative), I'd be surprised if they care if you are doing a joint-use of both development work and the user happens to do personal things too. If you want a clearer answer, I noticed when you actually join the developers.redhat.com program, someone overseeing the program emails you within a day or few and says if you have questions to let them know. If this #3 point of yours is really something you wish clarification on beyond this, register and reply back to the person who emails you from developers.redhat.com.

  • Your #4 point above, I suspect that point of yours still fits the pursuit of development work. I think if it is development work as they lay it out, they probably are good with it (see my last paragraph if you need something further).

Sign up for the program, they will email you and you can (if you wish) get even more clarification. My unconfirmed suspicion is that you're probably fine.

Kind Regards,

-RJ

How does that email look like? I am not able to find mine and many errata email comes up when searching.

In the terms, development purposes means writing software code, single-user testing and demonstration. Production purposes include multi-user testing, use in production environment and generally using live data for a purpose other than developnent purposes.

I also compared to MSDN from Microsoft which does not allow MSDN-licensed Windows to be used for other personal things but there is no issue installing development tools from Microsoft on production-licensed Windows. However, in Linux world, the license is for the subscription(software access, support etc.) instead of the software itself, not sure about if you have already obtained a copy or just use the software for sonething else personal, or even can Red Hat restrict the use when Linux is licensed under GPL and other licenses such as LGPL for the libraries. On SLES, if I did not make a mistake, personal use is explicitly permitted. It is really difficult to interpret the terms of Red Hat. What I actually want is a better CentOS, RHEL is generally more stable and patches are faster to come as well as good vulnerability notices, I don't really need SLA. If other personal uses are not permitted, I would stick with my current Surface device which is running Windows. I only have few uses other than 'real' development uses in which Linux is not really needed and I am just lazy taking out my Windows device and start it up.

Kwong, maybe the email went to a junk folder or something. I found mine, and I've asked the representative from Red Hat to look at this discussion and to see if they can answer your questions further.

Kind Regards, -RJ

My email hosting provider only keeps junk email for 30 days but my subscription was activated long ago.

Ah ok,

If needed, you can register again with a different email. But as I mentioned, I contacted a representative from Red Hat to look at your questions (see my last post).

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