Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has always been available under an open source license, but downloads usually require a support subscription. However, the company is now offering its flagship Linux distribution for free to anyone who signs up for its developer program. Developers won’t get support, but they will get access to the Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset
The move may be designed to counter the trend of enterprise application development teams building applications on CentOS and then migrating to RHEL in production. Ray Ploski, director of developer strategy for Red Hat, noted, “The more our customers embrace technologies like continuous integration or containers, the more important it is that we allow developers to start their projects in the same places where they’re going to deploy them.”
