Red Hat makes RHEL available for free to OSS infrastructure

Red Hat makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux available for free for use on open source infrastructure. This includes use for open source projects, but not for individual users.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Open Source Infrastructure is available to projects, communities, standardization organizations, and other nonprofits leveraging open source infrastructure. They do not have to pay for RHEL. The program is not for individual developers or existing customers, the company emphasizes. Projects supported by commercial companies may also qualify, but the free RHEL version may only run on independent infrastructure for the project.

Organizations can use the software for, among other things, build and test systems, as well as mail and web servers, with their subscription entitling them to access Red Hat’s customer portal, knowledge base articles and forums. Support for the analysis tool Red Hat Insights is also available, but the company does not offer free support by default. Support at no cost is an option, but it depends on the nature of the organization requesting it.

Red Hat considers all software published under a Fedora-approved license to be open source for its program. The offer follows free use of RHEL for small businesses, as Red Hat announced last month. Both announcements are inseparable from the criticism of the discontinuation of CentOS last year. Red Hat decided that CentOS will no longer be rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Stream release, but will instead be ahead of the stable releases of that Linux distro. The move means CentOS Linux 8 will be shutting down at the end of 2021, which has drawn much criticism from Red Hat.