Changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux downstream projects

Red Hat announced on June 21, 2023, that it would no longer make the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available to the general public. From now on, the code will only be available to customers who can’t legally share it.

Here is the link to the statement from a blog post:

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream

CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

It means that downstream projects that rebuild RHEL source code to produce compatible distributions such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux will no longer have access to it.

So I am sharing the new big picture of upstream and downstream projects related to RHEL.

Fedora and CentOS Stream are the upstream community projects of RHEL. The software developed and tested in Fedora flows into CentOS Stream, whence it flows into RHEL.

Fedora is developed by the Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. It follows its release schedule, with a new version approximately every six months; on the other side, a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes out every few years and is supported for up to 10 years.

Fedora supplies CentOS Stream and EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). EPEL is a particular interest group (SIG) from the Fedora Project that creates, maintains, and manages a high-quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, like RHEL, Scientific Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux.

CentOS Stream is a community project that paces the development of RHEL; it will become the next point release of RHEL and is an intermediary distribution between Fedora and RHEL.

CentOS Stream is periodically resynchronized with RHEL when a new major release occurs.

From RHEL, there are Red Hat consumers like RHEL CoreOS and Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI). RHEL CoreOS is released, upgraded, and managed as part of OpenShift; UIB is essentially a redistributable derivative of RHEL specifically designed for development and production use cases with containers.

From now, external downstream consumers, like Alam Linux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, will no longer have access to the RHEL source code.

Hope you got some helpful information from this post!