Red Hat will provide RHEL to open source organizations for free

Last month, Red Hat announced that it would provide free RHEL for small production environments, and now they have expanded the free RHEL to include projects, communities, standards bodies, and other open-source non-profit software groups. In this way, the above-mentioned organizations and institutions can also enjoy the convenience of using RHEL for free.

Since CentOS 8 will stop maintenance at the end of the year, the team will focus on CentOS Stream. Many developers who rely on CentOS in the production environment are hesitant to avoid the costs associated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For this reason, Red Hat’s latest plan to provide free RHEL in specific instances is “Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Open Source Infrastructure”.

Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy free RHEL to use within their infrastructure. Red Hat explained in the announcement:

Under the program’s terms, eligible organizations will be granted access to no-cost RHEL subscriptions for any use within the confines of their infrastructure. This includes build systems, continuous integration (CI) testing and general project requirements (i.e. web servers, mail servers, etc.). These subscriptions will be self-supported by default, which provides full access to the Red Hat customer portal, knowledge base articles and forums, and also include Red Hat Insights, our proactive analytic tooling. We may also be able to offer no-cost support depending on the scope and nature of the organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Open Source Infrastructure is not suitable for individual developers, existing Red Hat customers/partners, government organizations, medical institutions, academic institutions, or non-profit organizations that want to use RHEL outside of the independent open source project infrastructure.

Red Hat is continuing to explore new programs for traditional non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and government entities. Individual developers can easily access RHEL through the updated Red Hat Developer Program, and corporate customers can subscribe to Developer for Teams by contacting an account manager.