In a previous article, we highlighted the consternation that gripped the FOSS community, more particularly CentOS enthusiasts regarding the shift from CentOS project to the rolling release CentOS Stream. As you already know by now, CentOS 8 is being retired in favor of CentOS Stream which is going to be the upstream distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This move was taken with a lot of bile as many users were hopeful that CentOS 8 would be supported until 2029. This has planted seeds of mistrust and some have since contemplated transitioning to other stable and solid distributions for minimal workloads such as Debian and OpenSUSE.
In a surprise move, Redhat has made a bold attempt to assuage the fears and uncertainty of CentOS users. Through its RedHat Developer program, RedHat has expanded the terms of use from an individual RHEL subscription to small workloads. The definition of ‘small’ is up to 16 production servers or less at absolutely no cost. In a nutshell, RHEL will be free for up to 16 production servers. This provision will be made available starting February 1st, 2021.
Customer development teams can now join the program and take advantage of the RHEL developer suite. All you need is to Sign In using your Free Red Hat account and download RHEL upon where you will get 16 activation keys for one single developer at no cost. Through Red Hat Cloud Access, the developer program can be made portable and accessible to trusted major cloud providers such as Google Cloud and AWS also at no cost with exception of hosting charges. At the moment, the Red Hat Developer Program is a one-year subscription, and renewing it is as simple as a click of a button. Red Hat has stressed that they intend this to be sustainable and run for the long haul without termination.
In the meantime, CentOS Stream is still being continuously developed to take over from CentOS 8 after it reaches EOL on December 31, 2021. It is set to become the minor version of RHEL. Fedora Linux, where new RHEL releases are spawned, is continually being improved using new system innovations and ideas to deliver a more robust system.
