With two changes to the RHEL licensing, Red Hat probably wants to defuse its discontinuation of CentOS somewhat. On the one hand, the provider is expanding its developer program, with which individual developers can equip up to 16 systems with RHEL in the future. These can be used for test purposes, but it can also explicitly refer to systems that are in productive use are free. However, you must register with Red Hat with your own account or single sign-on with a third-party account. Support from Red Hat is not included; The provider also promises not to abuse the users of the program as an opportunity for sales.

Developer program for the entire department Furthermore, complete teams can be added to the developer program in the future, which also does not incur any additional costs and does not limit the options that can be selected. Systems at providers such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure can also be equipped with the free RHEL via Red Hat Cloud Access.

The changes to the developer program are taking effect February 1st. In the announcement, Red Hat also promises to introduce additional programs for previous CentOS applications in mid-February. The regular CentOS will take its leave at the end of 2021, shortly after the step became known, CloudLinux announced a RHEL-compatible alternative.

(fo)