https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of RHEL available to the public. From now on it will only be available to customers — who can't legally share it.
A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can't publish it.
This is very bad news for downstream projects which rebuild the RHEL source code to produce compatible distributions, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, EuroLinux, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
The core difference is that CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL: it's what will become the next point release of RHEL. At risk of sounding uncharitable, it's a sort of continuous rolling beta of the next version of RHEL. Alma, Rocky, and so on, and the former CentOS Linux, were downstream of RHEL: they were rebuilds from the same source code, guaranteeing perfect compatibility. So you could run one of the rebuilds, without paying Red Hat anything, while using the same drivers and getting perfect compatibility with RHEL apps.
You don't get that with CentOS Stream: It's a preview of the future of RHEL. Which is handy if you are a partner company developing products or drivers to run on RHEL, or you're a customer who wants to know what's going to come next. It's much less useful if you just want to run RHEL without paying. Or, of course, if you want to build your own copy of RHEL. We suspect that the wider RHEL user community doesn't care about Stream very much, and that may be a motivation behind the latest move.
Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge
Ripples rebounding and reflecting from Red Hat's rebuff of RHEL rebuilds
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/
The backlash against Red Hat's decision to stop distributing the source code of RHEL for free to non-customers continues to widen.
Last week, we reported that Red Hat would pull the sources of its enterprise distribution from its public Git servers. To quote Douglas Adams once again: "This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
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Meanwhile, though, the ripples continue to spread. Former Hatter Jeff Law posted an elegant critique to the Fedora-devel list, and the maintainers of probably the oldest RHEL rebuild still standing, Springdale Linux, have also noted that the move will cause them problems. An academic rebuild, Springdale used to be called PUIAS Linux after Princeton University and the Institute of Advanced Studies where it was created, and it predates even CentOS Linux.
Blogger and vlogger Jeff Geerling, who we've written about more than once before, is furious. Although he's probably best known for his Raspberry Pi-related content, Geerling is a prolific author of both playbooks, and perhaps more importantly textbooks, for the Ansible infrastructure-as-code tool, which Red Hat has owned since 2015. Geerling is removing support for RHEL from his tools. That won't merely inconvenience this community, it'll hurt.
Short version is that RedHat has kind of pulled the rug from under a damn lot of people, and nobody knows how it will affect non-enterpri$e customers and users.
Given Fedora's popularity, you are probably OK.
I personally am wary of capitalists wearing red hats.
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