smo , 1 year ago

We struggled with red hat because our product is usually in airgapped installations. We know how many we’ve sold, but we don’t know how many are still in use.

Say a customer buys one unit. Then 5 years later, they replace it. And 5 years on, they replace it again. On the books that’s 3 sold. We don’t know that two were retired, we don’t know these are all the same installation. So red hat wants us to pay 3 annual licences for this, and those licences don’t end until we can prove the installation was retired. The costs effectively snowball indefinitely.

We wanted to pay - it was the easiest route to certain federal qualifications. But we couldn’t come to an agreement on how to pay.