Red Hat will offer RHEL for free to small developer teams

Red Hat will give away Red Hat Enterprise Linux for free for small production environments. The organization is doing this after it decided to stop working on CentOS 8 last month. Developers can now use RHEL on sixteen machines.

RHEL, or Red Had Enterprise Linux, can be used for free via the Red Hat Developer program from 1 February , the organization writes . This can only be used for small teams, although they can be larger than before. An Individual Developer subscriber can now use not just one, but a maximum of sixteen systems. This makes RHEL suitable for ‘small production cases’, Red Hat writes. The company also says the program is not intended to sell more software later.

With the more extensive RHEL program, developers can also deploy their applications to cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud themselves. It will also be possible for paying RHEL customers to add their entire developer team to the program at no additional cost.

Red Hat is taking the step after the fuss that arose last month. Then the company said it would stop developing CentOS , a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Users were angry about this, because Red Hat had always told them that CentOS would last until 2029.