RHEL now free for developers and small production use

[Neil]

After Red Hat dropped the bomb just before Christmas about making CentOS 8 end of life and switching it to CentOS Stream which basically ended CentOS as we know it, they have now made RHEL FREE to use in development and small production environments (without support).

Today we’re sharing details about some of the new no- and low-cost programs we’re adding to RHEL. These are the first of many new programs.

No-cost RHEL for small production workloads​

While CentOS Linux provided a no-cost Linux distribution, no-cost RHEL also exists today through the Red Hat Developer program. The program’s terms formerly limited its use to single-machine developers. We recognized this was a challenging limitation.

We’re addressing this by expanding the terms of the Red Hat Developer program so that the Individual Developer subscription for RHEL can be used in production for up to 16 systems. That’s exactly what it sounds like: for small production use cases, this is no-cost, self-supported RHEL. You need only to sign in with a free Red Hat account (or via single sign-on through GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts) to download RHEL and receive updates. Nothing else is required. This isn’t a sales program