Red Hat restricts access to the RHEL source code

This week Red Hat changed how it publishes its source code, which is one way to start the summer. I have been discussing it with people in the industry and want to share my view.

To be clear, the source code is still available. But building copies that match Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) exactly, and are completely free and open source, is becoming much harder, perhaps impossible. In Red Hat’s language, “clones” such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux appear to be “freeloaders”.

What changed

On 21 June, Mike McGrath of Red Hat published a short post titled “Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream”. It drew little attention at first. In it, Red Hat announced that it would stop publishing RHEL sources on git.centos.org, and that CentOS Stream would be the only place where it publishes source code. Red Hat said the change does not affect the CentOS Project, CentOS Stream or the CentOS SIGs.

RHEL sources remain available to subscribers through Red Hat’s customer portals. Subscriptions are not always paid, but the sources are no longer public, and subscribers’ agreements with Red Hat forbid them from redistributing the code.

Red Hat defends the decision strongly. It points to more engagement with CentOS Stream, more engineering investment, and the priorities of its customers and partners, which in its view make separate, redundant repositories inefficient. The change may well drive RHEL adoption. It also makes a free community distribution that mirrors RHEL much harder to maintain.

The clones

Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux are attractive because they are like-for-like compatible with RHEL. The only public source left is CentOS Stream, which does not mirror RHEL. As RHEL’s upstream testing ground, it may not always meet the stability and security standards that production needs.

This raises the question of whether Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux will have to write their own specification files to rebuild the distribution. Faced with that much work, will they give up, or can they afford to take it on? Both projects have since said they will continue, each with a different approach.

What now?

This unexpected move by Red Hat and IBM could disrupt many Linux distributions, slow their development or cost them a lot of money. The effect looks planned. It could also shift the Linux community and the businesses that rely on it. Truly community-run distributions such as Debian may benefit, and that could be good for the ecosystem in the long run. Time will tell, but shifting market share and a move away from large corporations now look like real possibilities.

Seriously, Red Hat, why?