| guide | Red Hat recently announced that it has restricted access to the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), affecting downstream distributions such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. |
Red Hat recently announced restrictions on access to the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), affecting downstream distributions such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.
Rocky Linux released a blog post, saying that there are two ways to continue to obtain the RHEL source code
Rocky Linux released a blog post today titled "Keeping Open Source Open", indicating that it will continue to access RHEL's source RPMs (SRPM) through various online resources such as RHEL-based public cloud instances or UBI container images.
The main contents are as follows:
Red Hat's Terms of Service (TOS) and End User License Agreement (EULA) impose conditions in an attempt to prevent legitimate customers from exercising the rights guaranteed by the GPL.
Fortunately, we have two alternatives to get the source code:
One is to use the RHEL-based UBI container image, available through many online sources such as Docker Hub.
UBI images provide easy, reliable and unhindered access to Red Hat sources. We've verified this with an OCI (Open Container Initiative) container and it works exactly as expected.
Another way is to use paid public cloud instances. With this, anyone can boot a RHEL image in the cloud and thus get the source code for all packages and errata.
We can do everything through a CI pipeline, spin up cloud mirrors to fetch source code through DNF, and automatically publish to our Git repository, which is the easiest for us to scale.