AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL

With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do.

AlmaLinux has been among those sorting out what to do and moving forward have now decided to shift focus a bit. AlmaLinux will no longer be aiming to provide 1:1 compatibility with upstream RHEL but will maintain a commitment to be ABI compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

AlmaLinux announced a few minutes ago:

"After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.

We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community’s needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux.
...
For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of “bug-for-bug compatibility” with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream."

AlmaLinux will be evaluating what other options they may have now that they aren't sticking to 1:1 rebuild of RHEL. AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.