We would like to discuss the feasibility of creating and distributing PodVM images based on bootc tools from a legal, financial and support perspective, especially considering the challenges that arise when OpenShift sandboxed containers users lack RHEL subscriptions (unless they are also using of Openshift on BM / kubevirt).

The process of creating PodVM images based on bootc tools involves the following steps:

1. Building bootc-podvm: This step involves creating podvm-bootc container image based on the registry.redhat.io/rhel9/rhel-bootc image with few additional kata binaries & packages installed on top (using podman/buildah).
2. OpenShift users typically have access to registry.redhat.io, therefore, rhel-bootc can be used, however, installing additional packages on bootc-rhel requires a valid RHEL subscription.

1. Converting to PodVM Disk: The podvm-bootc container is then converted into a PodVM disk image (qcow2/raw/vhd). This is accomplished using bootc-image-builder.
2. Uploading to the Cloud (for the non BM/libvirt use cases): Finally, the PodVM disk image is uploaded to a cloud provider so it can serve as the VM image for OSC peer-pods or CoCo PodVMs.

We are raising the following questions to help us determine the feasible paths forward:

1. How are entitlements handled for a disk image created from a bootc container image with RHEL packages ? For example if the disk image is used to boot cloud instances, how are entitlements handled ?
2. Can a prebuilt bootc container image with RHEL packages (e.g the podvm-bootc) be distributed without RHEL entitlements?
3. Similarly, can we distribute a container image which has the prebuilt podVM disk image (converted from the podvm-bootc) in it to OSC users who do not have a RHEL entitlements?