AlmaLinux Responds to Red Hat Going Closed-Source

AlmaLinux has weighed in on Red Hat’s controversial decision to restrict access to its source code, saying the community distro will need to come up with “a new solution.”

Red Hat riled the Linux community with news that it would restrict access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code to paying customers. The news immediately cast doubt on Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, two community enterprise distros that offer 1:1 compatibility with RHEL.

Rocky Linux quickly posted a message reassuring users that everything would continue on and that customers would not be impacted by Red Hat’s change. AlmaLinux has similarly weighed in, although the organization is taking a measured approach. Writing for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Board Chair benny Vasquez highlighted what many others have noted, namely that the RHEL license appears to prohibit “re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal,” likely eliminating the possibility of simply acquiring an RHEL license and using it to maintain AlmaLinux.

The short- and long-term solutions to this change are something we will be discussing over the coming weeks. We spent much of our time today diving deep to ensure we understood the depth of the problem, and discussing our potential options.

In the short term, we will be working with other members of the RHEL ecosystem to ensure that we continue to deliver security updates with the speed and stability that we have become known for.

In the long-term, we’ll be working with those same partners and with our community to identify the best path forward for AlmaLinux as part of the enterprise Linux ecosystem.

As the above illustrates, there is still much about Red Hat’s decision and the long-term fallout that is still unknown.