AlmaLinux Figuring Out Path Forward Following RHEL Source Code Policy Change

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball.

Yesterday was the announcement of Red Hat now limiting access to the RHEL sources. RHEL is limiting their public sources to CentOS Stream while those wanting the exact RHEL source code will need to obtain it through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

AlmaLinux put out a statement confirming the Red Hat Customer Portal does indeed restrict their ability to reproduce their 1:1 RHEL builds as they do now:

"This change means that we, as builders of a RHEL clone, will now be responsible for following the licensing and agreements that are in place around Red Hat’s interfaces, in addition to following the licenses included in the software sources. Unfortunately the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements."

AlmaLinux also isn't interested in being a downstream of CentOS Stream but ideally would like to continue providing free-of-cost, binary-compatible builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In the near-term they are going to focus on providing security updates to AlmaLinux via tracking CentOS Stream changes and the likes of Oracle Linux. But longer-term they will work with the other RHEL downstreams and partners for finding a suitable path forward.

More details via the statement on AlmaLinux.org.