Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of its enterprise distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), publicly available.
From now on, CentOS Stream will be the only repository for public RHEL-related source code releases , which can be accessed by paying customers and partners through the Red Hat Customer Portal .
CentOS Stream is a rolling update distribution launched by Red Hat, which is closely related to RHEL-belonging to the upstream version of RHEL.
It can be said that CentOS Stream is an intermediate process in the RHEL development process (before releasing a new RHEL version, Red Hat will develop the source code of RHEL in the CentOS Stream development platform), which contains the expectations of the next release version in RHEL Features and updates.
As a derivative of RHEL, CentOS Stream has many similarities with RHEL, but there are many differences between the two in terms of release cycle, support cycle, software packages, security, etc.
In addition to CentOS Stream, the community has built distributions such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux based on RHEL—as an alternative to CentOS.
However, a change announced by Red Hat recently may have a serious impact on these distributions.
Red Hat blogged:
As the CentOS Stream community continues to grow and respond to new dynamics in the enterprise software world, we want to keep the focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation.
We will continue to invest and increase our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the only repository for public RHEL related source distributions.
For Red Hat customers and partners, the RHEL source code is still available through the Red Hat Customer Portal under their subscription agreement.
To be clear, this change does not represent any changes to the CentOS Project, CentOS Stream, or CentOS SIGs source code availability.
Since CentOS Stream will now be the only repository for public RHEL-related source code releases, this also means that distributions based on RHEL (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, etc.) will be more difficult to provide 100% compatible with RHEL versions1: 1 build.
As for why such a decision was made, Red Hat said in a blog post:
Before CentOS Stream, Red Hat pushed RHEL's public source code to git.centos.org.
When the CentOS project moved to CentOS Stream as the centerpiece, we maintained these repositories even though RHEL-based CentOS Linux was no longer built.
Engagement, engineering investments around CentOS Stream, and new priorities of customers and partners that we are addressing make maintaining separate, redundant repositories inefficient .
To sum it up in one sentence, as an upstream RHEL, it will only provide services to paying customers in the future.
Because of this, many users of downstream releases in the community are condemning Red Hat's approach, and some even accuse Red Hat of betraying open source and violating the terms of the GPL. But in fact, Red Hat's move is in full compliance with the terms of the GPL.
In addition, shortly after Red Hat announced this decision, the AlmaLinux development team issued an announcement on the social platform, saying that it would study the impact of this change on them, so that community members should not panic.