Linux Is The Next Platform, But Who Pays To Maintain It?
The Next Platform, Thursday, July 13,2023
Red Hat has once again dropped another huge boulder into the normally serene - or at least relatively calm - open source waters.
Back in December 2020 it killed off the CentOS distribution that lives downstream from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and created the CentOS Stream variant that lives upstream where bugs are not yet all shaken out. And now Red Hat has announced that it would no longer distribute free RHEL source code to those who aren't paying customers.
That means projects like Oracle Linux, EuroLinux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux no longer will see code improvements from Red Hat, a change in a practice that is more than a decade old. Unsurprisingly, those projects and others reacted with fury to Red Hat's decision, accusing the open source titan of essentially closing its doors to the open source community and accusing IBM of driving the move.