Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Open Source Infrastructure is a new (free) no-cost program tailored for the needs and requirements of projects, foundations and more.
As you know Red Hat recently announced that CentOS Linux 8 as a rebuild of RHEL 8 will end in 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The news met with a strong reaction from the open-source community and CentOS users.
Now RedHat will provide selected bodies no-cost “RHEL subscriptions for any use within the confines of their infrastructure.” By infrastructure, they mean things like: build and continuous integration systems, and web and mail servers.
Under the program’s terms, eligible organizations will be granted access to no-cost RHEL subscriptions for any use within the confines of their infrastructure. These subscriptions will be self-supported by default, which provides full access to the Red Hat customer portal, knowledge base articles and forums, and also include Red Hat Insights, our proactive analytic tooling.
The new option supposed to help:
- Developers
- Sysadmins
- Home lab builders
- Small dev teams
- Non-profits who were previously using CentOS as a drop-in replacement for RHEL.
Until now Red Hat developer program allows single machine subscription for developers. You can’t use a developer subscription in production. So, this has already changed.
Using the Red Hat Subscription Services for Individual Development Use and/or Individual Production Use on more than sixteen (16) Physical or Virtual Nodes.
Therefore now you can use these subscriptions with cloud service providers like CCP, AWS, and Azure. Great.
Conclusion
In short the point is clear. If you were using CentOS for your infrastructure in an upstream open-source project, where the license is a Fedora-approved license, you could be eligible for no-cost RHEL to replace your CentOS. CentOS stream will continue as a development branch for the next RHEL minor version. Regarding Fedora, Red Hat will keep it “for driving leading-edge development of Linux operating system improvements and enhancements.”
More details for RHEL for Open-Source Infrastructure can be fond in the official announcement.
