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ZDNET's key takeaways
You can run RHEL now for as long as you're willing to sign up for annual contracts.
This plan provides critical security patches, urgent bug fixes, and 24x7 technical support.
There is no standard price. You'll need to negotiate with Red Hat for your specific case.
Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, enterprise Linux distributors offered 3 to 5 years of support. Then, starting in the 2020s, Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical, the top Linux companies, started offering up to a decade or more of support. Now, Red Hat is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Long-Life Add-On, aka "RHEL Forever." It does exactly what it says: it offers support for any particular version of RHEL so long as you're willing to pay the bill.
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RHEL Forever isn't for everyone. Red Hat is pitching the new offering as a way to align software lifecycles with the multi‑decade horizons common in highly regulated and capital‑intensive industries, such as finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government. That said, many companies are extremely reluctant to upgrade their servers, which is one reason why the long-out-of-support CentOS still has many users. I expect many of these businesses will be more than willing to pay for this new subscription level.
New add-on promises multi-decade RHEL
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