There are subscription costs built into the VMs on public cloud. Azure gets the money for the compute but a percentage goes to the company maintaining the distro. Its quite a large revenue source.
Regardless of that, my question was independent of a support agreement: Do you know of any major Linux distribution besides RHEL that charges a fee and requires an agreement with the manufacturer to use or download their production version?
What?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/redhat/redhat-images
There are subscription costs built into the VMs on public cloud. Azure gets the money for the compute but a percentage goes to the company maintaining the distro. Its quite a large revenue source.
Do you know of any major Linux distribution besides RHEL that charges a subscription fee? I don’t.
Edit: I poked around the site a little more. I had quite a bit of trouble sorting out what the comparison was between costs of different Linux distributions, but (a) it looks to me like the cost of Redhat is exactly the same as the cost of Ubuntu (b) it looks like there may be some sort of bundled corporate support as part of the package, for which I’m sure there’s a cost © their list of which distros to include (Redhat / SUSE / Ubuntu) is quite weird coming from the Linux world. Most providers I’m familiar with default to Debian for servers.
Regardless of that, my question was independent of a support agreement: Do you know of any major Linux distribution besides RHEL that charges a fee and requires an agreement with the manufacturer to use or download their production version?
Yeah it requires a little investigation but here is a breakdown:
Ubuntu (Canonical) Free Pro - pay as you go (gives package patches) Pro + Support - pay as you go (SLA)
RHEL (Red Hat Inc) Premium - pay as you go (patches only)
CentOS (Many image providers) Free
Debian (Debian) Free
SLES (Suse) Premium - Pay as you go (patches only)
Oracle Linux (Oracle) Free Support - pay as you go