Red Hat's Source Restriction: The Future of CentOS, Rocky, and Others in Question?

[h2ccomputer]

Greetings everyone, I aspire to enhance my knowledge and make incremental contributions each day. Wishing success to all.

With Red Hat now limiting access to the package sources, does this signal the demise of CentOS, Rocky, and similar distributions?
I initially believed that obtaining a single subscription could grant access to the sources, which could then be shared publicly. However, there may be nuances to this situation that I am not fully grasping.

[jlehtone]

With Red Hat now limiting access to the package sources, does this signal the demise of CentOS, Rocky, and similar distributions?

CentOS is not affected, because it is already practically dead. The only remaining CentOS Linux -- CentOS 7 -- will EOL by next Summer.

CentOS Stream is not a "similar distribution". It is a peek into development branch of corresponding RHEL. "Upstream." Its sources and builds come directly from Red Hat. It will continue to exists (as long as it benefits Red Hat, which it clearly does).


There were a lot of discussions last Summer when Red Hat did change their policy on RHEL source availability. "Big" names, like Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux did all find some way to carry on. Could Red Hat issue further restrictions? Sure. The sky can also fall on us. I would not worry about that. Even if these distros vanish tomorrow, I've already got more from them than I've paid for.