2023-06-22 21:00:00
The small world of GNU/Linux distributions is not necessarily a quiet world: in a somewhat surprising move, the company Red Hat, which distributes the commercial Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in particular, has announced that the sources of this distribution would no longer be public. Only those of CentOS Stream remain accessible.
All of this may sound a bit complicated, but we will explain it. A GNU/Linux distribution (Linux in the following) can be seen as a complete operating system, with all the tools necessary for its operation. Some are limited to a specific use, others are aimed at a wider audience, and RHEL is a commercial distribution that is aimed at companies, in particular because Red Hat offers paid support for its distribution.
Red Hat Entreprise Linux (Grimes, GPL)
In his blog post, Red Hat explain that the RHEL sources are no longer publicly available — they remain available to customers and partners — and that the only Red Hat distribution whose sources remain available is CentOS Stream. This is a so-called version upstream of RHEL, i.e. a derived version which is developed upstream. In a simpler way, Red Hat developers first test new features through CentOS Stream, which therefore contains more recent versions of the various software… but also potentially more bugs.
The comparison with the different versions of macOS is a little complicated: CentOS Stream cannot be directly compared to a beta version of Apple’s OS, and Apple does not offer an equivalent of RHEL, which could possibly be seen as a version stabilized and followed by a previous macOS.
A problem related to forks
But why is Red Hat partially shutting down its main distribution? Probably to partly protect its main cast. Indeed, the world of Linux distributions is essentially composed of what are called fork. The literal translation is fork, because a fork part of a distribution to create a new branch. And Red Hat isn’t too keen on companies offering forks fully compatible with RHEL. The distributions that derive from RHEL can indeed replace the distro, which is obviously a potential loss for Red Hat. The best known are AlmaLinux (quite recent), Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux.
AlmaLinux (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
As’explain PhoronixAlmaLinux developers reacted to this change. They obviously discovered this change by chance, and they don’t know Red Hat’s intentions. For the moment, the development is therefore likely to be complicated: cloning CentOS Stream is obviously not an option. The main problem comes from the differences between RHEL and CentOS Stream, which is a little too experimental to offer the perfect compatibility expected by AlmaLinux users. In a sense, the survival of distributions that derive from RHEL is therefore compromised, at least in the current configuration.
Let’s end with a point: the only Linux distribution compatible with Apple Silicon Macs — Asahi Linux — does not derive from a Red Hat distribution, but from Arch Linux.
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