DISTRO
Red Hat announces source code of RHEL will only be available to paying customers, who can’t redistribute it.
Red Hat stands out in the Linux world. Its development of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is based on open source software but customers have to pay subscriptions for use of programs, updates, security patches and technical support.
This is great news for those who are able and willing to pay. Redistributing modified open source software for a fee doesn’t violate the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), provided the developer provides a copy of the source code to anyone to whom they distribute binaries.
This technicality seems to be what Red Hat relied on in its announcement on 21st June that it’s “furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream”. A community-driven OS, CentOS aspired to binary compatibility with RHEL without requiring users to pay. This may have been why Red Hat acquired it in 2014 and replaced it with CentOS Stream, an upstream beta of software to be used in the next major release of RHEL.
In the Red Hat Blog post, Mike McGrath, vice president of core platforms at RHEL, announced: “CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.” In other words the source code for RHEL will only be available to paying customers, who can’t legally redistribute it.
So, what will become of projects such a
