For more general project infrastructure, I think that the stability, security, and predictability that lead our customers to choose RHEL will also be attractive to open source projects and organizations. Organizations should use the distribution that works best for them, but if testing for RHEL compatibility is what you’re looking for, then it’s tough to beat actual RHEL installs for that. Why should organizations opt to go with RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure, as opposed to opting for, say, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, or Ubuntu Server? Lots of open source projects test for RHEL compatibility by testing on CentOS Linux, so it’s important that we ensure that projects that need RHEL for building and testing have access to it before the shift to CentOS Stream is complete.

We were prompted to turn that ad hoc effort into a real program by the shift in the CentOS Project to focus on CentOS Stream instead of CentOS Linux. We’ve been providing RHEL to certain open source organizations for some time now, but in an ad hoc way. What necessitated the need to extend this project? If open source developers want to build and test their software on RHEL, we want to make sure that RHEL is available to them. We’re also doing this because we want the open source ecosystem to support RHEL. RHEL is a great platform for running production infrastructure, and we want to make it available to groups in that ecosystem that wouldn’t otherwise be in a position to acquire it.

We’re doing this because we want to support the open source ecosystem. Red Hat is providing not-for-profit projects and organizations that produce or support the production of open source software with no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The New Stack was fortunate to speak with Jason Brooks, who is Red Hat’s manager for community architects and infrastructure, to get some clarity on the expansion of the project.Įxplain the RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure in such a way that organizations can clearly understand what the project is about.

It can, according to the company, “give open source communities, projects, foundations and other organizations a stable foundation for creating and hosting innovative open source software.” In response to the outcry, Red Hat extended the availability of RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure to include not-for-profit organizations. In many cases, they couldn’t afford the subscription fees that came with the company’s flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) itself. Last year, when Red Hat changed the course of its CentOS Linux distribution to be more of an experimental build for cloud native environments, many organizations depending on this distribution were worried about finding a no-cost, enterprise-ready Linux distribution.

Is red hat enterprise linux free