Red Hat continues its efforts to promote open source software, but will not withdraw its plans for limited availability of RHEL. The company said this in an initial response to the commotion that arose after last week, when it emerged that Red Hat wanted to put its Enterprise Linux behind a paywall.
Mike McGrath, the vice president of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat, writes in a blog post that the company wants to continue its commitment to open source software and licenses such as GPL. According to him, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, will remain available under such a license. At the same time, the company does not change its mind and from now on RHEL will remain behind a paywall. According to McGrath, this is necessary because other developers often use RHEL as a basis for their own distros that they then resell at a profit. It is precisely those people, he says, who are most angry about the paywall. “This demand for RHEL code is unfair,” says McGrath. “We have to pay people for all the work they do.”
McGrath also calls it ‘categorically untrue’ that RHEL is now closed source software. “There is a difference between the binary and the CentOS Stream source code repository,” he says. In the latter, RHEL releases are made public ‘where everyone can see’. Since 2020, CentOS Stream is no longer a rebuild of RHEL, but the only repo based on RHEL.
There’s a difference between distros that add proprietary architecture and compile flags to RHEL and distros that just take RHEL, repackage it and resell it, McGrath says. He calls the latter ‘a serious threat to open source and open source companies’. McGrath warns that such practices “throw the open source world back into that of the hobbyists and hackers.”
The blog post is a response to an earlier announcement from Red Hat. The company said last week that it makes RHEL no longer generally available, but only sells to Red Hat Enterprise customers. This makes CentOS Stream the only available RHEL repo. This has major implications for alternative distros such as Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux, which all use RHEL and also present themselves as alternatives to CentOS and RHEL. Rocky Linux said it before thinks the decision will not have major consequences for the future of the operating system. Rocky Linux says that while it can no longer operate automatically, it is putting in place a long-term strategy that takes limited availability into account.