As you know, Red Hat recently announced that CentOS Linux 8, a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end in 2021. CentOS Stream will continue 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 with no-cost “RHEL subscriptions for any use within the confines of their infrastructure.” Infrastructure refers to building 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 aims 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, the Red Hat developer program has allowed developers to purchase single-machine subscriptions. However, from now on, you can’t use a developer subscription also in production, with the option to register for free up to 16 machines.
Using the Red Hat Subscription Services for Individual Development Use and/or Individual Production Use on more than sixteen (16) Physical or Virtual Nodes.
Furthermore, you can now use these subscriptions with cloud service providers like GCP, AWS, and Azure.
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.
The 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.”
The official announcement contains more details for RHEL for Open-Source Infrastructure.
