Regarding Red Hat's policy of restricting access to RHEL source code , the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board of Directors has just announced the latest decision : to abandon the goal of being 1:1 compatible with RHEL and to work on compatibility with the Application Binary Interface (ABI) in the future .
AlmaLinux will continue to provide RHEL-aligned, ABI-compatible long-term enterprise-grade Linux distributions, and software that runs on RHEL will continue to run on AlmaLinux.
For users, this decision makes little difference to their use of AlmaLinux. After all, RHEL-compatible applications will still run on the AlmaLinux operating system and will continue to receive timely security updates.
The most notable potential impact of this change is that AlmaLinux will no longer be bound by Red Hat's "bug-for-bug compatibility", so they can now make bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. Of course some AlmaLinux users may encounter bugs that are not in RHEL, but AlamLinux will also accept patches for bugs that have not been accepted upstream or sent downstream.
For the AlmaLinux team, they will change the development and build process. Like adding a note to the patch that includes a link to where to get the applied patch. This change helps further the goal of transparency.