Red Hat limits public RHEL sources to CentOS Stream

Red Hat said on 21 June that CentOS Stream would become the sole public repository for RHEL-related source releases, ending its separate git.centos.org publication route. Customers and partners retain RHEL sources through subscription portals. The company says duplicate repositories became inefficient; CentOS Stream and its Special Interest Groups keep their existing source availability.

Archive photograph: “Headquarter of Red Hat Czech in Brno, Czech Republic.jpg”. © Teknoraver, 30 January 2018. Own work via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Brno offices with Red Hat’s pre-2019 Shadowman branding, not the June 2023 announcement. No endorsement implied. Cropped from the source photograph. This adaptation is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The March 2023 subscription appendix explains the portal constraint. Section 1.2(g) classifies using subscription services in connection with software redistribution as unauthorised use and a material breach. Section 1.4 says the agreement governs subscription services and isn’t intended to limit open-source code rights. Existing purchases may retain earlier terms for their subscription period, so this document doesn’t establish every customer’s obligations.

Code licences impose their own requirements. For GPLv2-covered software, section 3 specifies ways to provide corresponding source when distributing binaries. Section 6 grants downstream recipients rights to copy, modify and redistribute, and forbids additional restrictions on those rights. A public Git repository isn’t itself the licence requirement. These provisions don’t settle whether a particular subscription arrangement complies with the GPL.

Why CentOS Stream isn’t a direct replacement

AlmaLinux’s 22 June response shows why the distinction matters to rebuilders. The project says its reading of the portal agreements would prevent it from republishing sources obtained there. That’s its interpretation, not a judicial finding. It also says CentOS Stream runs upstream of RHEL and doesn’t always contain every patch in released RHEL packages. Public development sources therefore aren’t automatically a matching input for a downstream rebuild.

Its immediate plan is to select updates from CentOS Stream and Oracle Linux, then test and curate them for compatibility with RHEL. AlmaLinux says this will keep security patches flowing while it works on a longer-term approach. The remaining work is a reliable way to assemble and verify compatible updates, rather than simply replacing one repository address with another.