Colleagues:
We are writing to provide an update on licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IU. As we have previously shared, Red Hat substantially increased their pricing for RHEL and the university has been working since then to reduce our dependence on RHEL, an effort that has been very successful. RHEL usage has dropped significantly across the institution.
In previous communications, we have indicated that units would have to pay for any residual RHEL licenses needed this upcoming year. However, due to the rapid drop off in usage and some price concessions from Red Hat, UITS will be able to fund all remaining Red Hat licenses in use through a renewal of a reduced-in-scope license. Existing installations connected to the IU license will continue to function with no action required.
Please note that this is not a permanent change. All servers running RHEL that can be migrated to other operating systems should do so before next February’s renewal. However, we also want to collect any use cases where RHEL is required to meet an operational need (for example, software that is only supported on RHEL). If you have those use cases, please contact ITCP (itcp@iu.edu). ITCP will catalogue those and allow for a more targeted discussion at the next renewal period. Those use cases must be reported before the start of the fall semester to be considered.
Thank you for your support and partnership on this project.
–IT Community Partnerships on behalf of University Information Technology Services