Almalinux will no longer be 1:1 with RHEL
Wow, Red Hat's decision restrict access to rhel code has given to talk and above all has generated various changes and a lot of decision making by the projects that are based on RHEL, since they were affected in an "indirect" way.
The change is due to the fact that Red Hat stopped publishing srpm packages publicly in the git.centos.org public repository and left only the CentOS Stream repository as the sole public source of the RHEL package code.
For customers, the ability to download srpm packages through the closed section of the site, where an additional user agreement (EULA) prohibits data redistribution, which prevents these packages from being used to create derivative distributions.
The CentOS Stream repository is out of sync with RHEL and the latest package versions do not always match the RHEL packages. Usually CentOS Stream development is carried out with a slight advantage, but there are also reverse situations: updates to some packages (for example, with the kernel) in CentOS Stream may be released with a delay.
Among the changes that were announced and that we have shared here on the blog, are the initial moves by AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, which they mentioned a change in their roadmaps and processes.
Also We must not leave aside the strong criticism that Oracle made to Red Hat, with which the restriction of access to the RHEL code was not measured and totally disapproved, hiding behind “absurd” pretexts.
Besides that also SUSE wanted to join the list of participants with the announcement of its own RHEL, under the argument of promoting the union of the community and fostering diversity.
For its part, the project AlmaLinux despite having made it known that at the beginning it would continue to be 1:1 with RHEL, announce a change in development strategy, whereupon the distribution will no longer fully clone Red Hat Enterprise Linux and will allow minor differences in behavior (it will be possible to apply/absence of some individual patches).
Now that we're no longer just a 1:1 Red Hat rebuild, we're taking some time to consider the possibilities around what that means. We will continue to provide updates on that process and will include AlmaLinux OS Foundation members in that conversation and decision-making process as well.
At the same time, the project will preserve binary compatibility at the ABI level and it can still be used as a replacement for RHEL. As well as that AlmaLinux will allow the inclusion of bug fixes that are not yet accepted upstream or released in later projects. AlmaLinux, as before, will send information about detected bugs to upstream Fedora and CentOS Stream projects, but now it will not wait for fixes to be accepted into them.
We share some initial thoughts, but intentionally take our time to decide the right next step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board of directors decided today to drop the goal of being 1:1 with RHEL. The AlmaLinux operating system, on the other hand, will attempt to be compatible with the Application Binary Interface (ABI)*.
We will continue to aim to produce a long-term, enterprise-grade Linux distribution that is aligned and ABI-compliant with RHEL in response to the needs of our community, to the extent possible, and in such a way that the software running on RHEL it will run the same on AlmaLinux.
It is worth mentioning that it is observed that for ordinary users, the changes in the use of AlmaLinux will be minimal: RHEL-compliant applications will continue to work and installed systems will receive updates to fix vulnerabilities. The changes will mainly concern keeping the package compliant at the recurrence level of errors: AlmaLinux will now accept bug fixes that are not yet fixed in RHEL releases.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to learn more about the note, I invite you to consult the original publication which you can visit at the following link.