Red Hat and the state of the Linux ecosystem
To date I've been fairly quiet on the latest IBM/Red Hat decisions. Over the past few weeks I've seen many posts sharing various opinions one way or another. Some people have been very critical of Red Hat's decision to stop publishing RHEL sources to git.centos.org. What does this mean, the shortest explanation, distributions such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux who rely on these sources to build their downstream distrubution will need to find another way forward.
Various distributions that rely on the RHEL sources have each responded in their own way. Rocky has confirmed that they will continue to build their 1:1 RHEL clone using sources gained from other places. Both Alma and Oracle Linux said they will no longer be producing a 1:1 clone, but a compatible OS. The SUSE company has pledged to spend $10 million to create a RHEL fork and create a foundation to maintain it.
What's this all mean?
Whether I agree with Red Hat's decision or not truly doesn't matter. My day job is a 100% Red Hat environment, will closing access to the source or changes to 1:1 matter to me, probably not. I will continue to work with official Red Hat systems both at work and in my personal lab through my developer subscription. I will continue to maintain and get new certifications. If anything this might restore a little bit of exclusivity and value to the Red Hat certification (or not who knows). The one thing I know is the following, the Linux community will continue to move along as it always has. If anything, based on the responses above, the ecosystem will expand and improve as it always has in the face of change. I personally see this as a very small void in the ecosystem that will be quickly filled by new, enterprising and innovative distros.