RHEL users raise concerns over Red Hat’s dependency on CentOS Stream

Red Hat’s decision to change the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has faced criticism from developers and users who believe it could lead to higher costs. The company recently emphasized its commitment to CentOS Stream as a means of improving collaboration and speeding up delivery of new innovations to RHEL. However, some have raised concerns about CentOS Stream being an early version of features for RHEL rather than a supported version. This has prompted alternative options like Fedora and Rocky Linux to be suggested as true open-source alternatives. SUSE has also pledged to fork RHEL based on publicly available code to provide a RHEL-compatible distribution without restrictions. Oracle has criticized Red Hat’s approach and suggested that IBM becomes a consumer of Oracle Linux. The changes have raised speculation that Red Hat may be moving towards a paid model for RHEL rather than a free open-source model. Red Hat officials responded to the criticism, stating that there would be no additional costs or inconveniences for developers and users. They clarified that the changes were aimed at discouraging repackagers from adding no value to RHEL distributions and reselling them, while still encouraging good behavior through CentOS Stream. Red Hat believes that using CentOS Stream would allow repackagers to add value to their distributions and differentiate them from competitors. Some analysts support Red Hat’s move, as it allows the company to generate more revenue from its investments in RHEL.