Red Hat Enterprised Linux Sources Will Now Be Available To Paying Customers Only

"CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases..." Red Hat posted this week on its blog, arguing that "The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we're addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient." Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb notes this means patches and changes will now hit CentOS Stream before actually hitting RHEL, which "will make it difficult for other distributions such as Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux to provide assured binary compatibility as their only source now will be ahead of what RHEL is actually using." "Some commentators are pointing out that it's possible to sign up for a free Red Hat Developer account, and obtain the source code legitimately that way," writes the Register. "This is perfectly true, but the problem is that the license agreement that you have to sign to get that account prevents you from redistributing the software." Hackaday notes that beyond the the GPL v2 license on the kernel, Red Hat also has "an additional user agreement that terminates access to updates if the code is re-published." Rocky Linux officially "remains confident in its ability to continue as a bug-for-bug compatible and freely available alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, despite changes in accessibility."While this decision does change the automation we use for building Rocky Linux, we have already created a short term mitigation and are developing the longer term strategy. There will be no disruption or change for any Rocky Linux users, collaborators, or partners... The project pledges to keep its promise to maintain the full life-span of support for Rocky 8 and 9, and to continue to produce future RHEL-compatible versions as long as the option remains, allowing organizations to maintain the flexibility, control, and freedom they rely upon for their critical infrastructure. This is the open source way. Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the Rocky Linux project, calls Red Hat's move "a minor inconvenience for the Rocky Linux team," but with "no disruption to Rocky Linux users. Moving forward we are becoming even more stable, supported, and secure." AlmaLinux also weighs in: Can you just use CentOS Stream sources? No, we are committed to remaining a downstream RHEL clone, and using CentOS Stream sources would make us upstream of RHEL. CentOS Stream sources, while being upstream of RHEL, do not always include all patches and updates that are included in RHEL packages. Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones? We cannot speak to Red Hat's intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.

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