SUSE to continue supporting CentOS 7 users after Red Hat pulls the plug
Quoting: SUSE to continue supporting CentOS 7 users after Red Hat pulls the plug - Techzine Europe —
In the middle of last year, Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS, a free and fully compatible Linux distribution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This has effectively put the enterprise-focused Linux from Red Hat behind a paywall. As the end-of-support date for CentOS 7 approaches, it is forcing SUSE, not Red Hat, to take action.
SUSE will continue to support CentOS 7 with security updates after June 30, taking over from Red Hat. Liberty Linux on its own has been a direct alternative to RHEL for more than two years. Upon announcing it, SUSE explained that organizations are relying on multiple vendors and open-source communities for support. Liberty Linux’s core purpose was already to prevent vendor lock-in, including the then-unknown elimination of free CentOS support. Now, SUSE is adding another product to ensure that mission continues.
Also:
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New SUSE Liberty Linux Lite Offering Provides Secure, Stable, and Future-Proof Solution for Centos 7 Users Bracing for End Of Life
With SUSE Liberty Linux Lite for CentOS 7, organizations can continue running their existing CentOS 7 operating system environments with zero disruption, zero migrations and zero upgrades. With SUSE, there is no time-consuming migration path. All customers need to do to receive updates and patches is simply change the pointer of CentOS to a SUSE Liberty Linux repository. No other changes are required.
Since its inception, SUSE Liberty Linux has been a popular choice for customers needing secure and flexible Linux management without the need to migrate. SUSE Liberty Linux customers include global enterprises across a variety of industries including financial services, telecommunications and automotive. Eduardo Luis Piccoli, IT Infrastructure Analyst at WEG, a global electro-electronic equipment company based in Brazil, says, "SUSE Liberty Linux gives us the ability to support several other Linux distros in only one solution."
The Register:
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CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE
SUSE has unveiled a Liberty Linux Lite solution aimed at enticing CentOS 7 administrators facing the impending June 30 end-of-support deadline.
According to the veteran Linux vendor, "SUSE Liberty Linux Lite for CentOS 7 is a frictionless solution that provides customers with updates and security patches for their existing CentOS system, with no migration whatsoever."
SUSE, however, charges a fee. The service, starting at $25 per server/instance per year with a minimum spend of $2,500, includes long-life updates that will continue until June 30, 2028.
The deal is the latest aimed at extending CentOS 7 support. CIQ, which offers the CentOS rebuild Rocky Linux, has its own take on support extension in the form of CIQ Bridge, which will keep critical security updates coming for up to another three years.
Linuxiac:
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SUSE Liberty Linux Lite Extends CentOS 7’s Life to 2028
CentOS 7 will end its maintenance period on June 30. While it may be acceptable for home users to perform an in-place migration to Alma, Rocky, or Oracle, this may not sound like an attractive option for small, medium, and especially large enterprises.
If you have some CentOS 7 servers still running, switching to another supported Linux distribution has risks that can translate into serious financial losses.
In response, SUSE has introduced a new offer specifically designed to support these businesses. This offer ensures that their CentOS 7 systems will continue to receive security updates until at least 2028.
Linux Magazine:
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SUSE Offers CentOS 7 Spport with Liberty Linux... » Linux Magazine
SUSE is never one to back down from offering support for distributions other than its own, in-house, enterprise-grade operating system. Case in point, SUSE Liberty Linux has offered support for RHEL since the early 2020s and now they're extending that support to CentOS 7.
The support offered protects CentOS 7 from future vulnerabilities by providing updates and security patches.
According to Rick Spencer, GM of Business Critical Linux, SUSE, "Open source technologies are the cornerstone of innovation for enterprises, fostering collaboration, agility, and cost-effectiveness."
Spenser continues, "Ensuring CentOS 7 users have a secure, enterprise-ready, future-proof Linux solution is important to SUSE, and we are delighted to be in a position to support CentOS 7 users as they face this uncertain and risky situation."
CentOS 7 reaches EOL on June 30, 2024, and there are a large number of businesses that continue to rely on the open-source operating system. Thanks to SUSE Liberty Linux Lite, those businesses won't have to concern themselves with migration.
FOSS Force:
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No Need to Move From CentOS 7 by June 30 If You Have Aftermarket Support - FOSS Force
Let’s face it. With less than a week remaining on the clock, if you’re still running CentOS 7 you’re not going to get it changed to something else by the time it reaches end-of-life — especially if you have thousands of servers to swap out.
That’s OK though, because in spite of all the doomsday advice you’ve been seeing online to the contrary, you absolutely don’t have to be in any sort of hurry to shut down your instances of CentOS 7. What you do have to do in a hurry, if you haven’t done it already, is find affordable support, and that’s easily done — but more on that later. First we’ll talk about the mess that CentOS users currently find themselves in, and how we got here.
“A large organization, if it has a few hundred systems, or thousands or dozens of thousands for the very large deployments, is already out of time to do the migration,” Tux Care’s Joao Correia told me in an interview in early April, back when CentOS 7 still had two-and-a-half months before it reached its “expires on” date. “There’s no way that they can plan and migrate and operate and get stuff back in working order before the end-of-life date.”