Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution that targets its products primarily for businesses.
Recently Red Hat unveiled via a blog post a change in the focus of the publication of the sources of packages for distribution "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", which is essentially announcing that from now on you will no longer publish the package code to the Git repository at git.centos.org.
Through this announcement, Red Hat informs the community that the only public source for RHEL packages now it will be the CentOS Stream repository, As of the announcement, Red Hat customers and partners will still be able to download code for packages corresponding to RHEL releases through the company's customer portal, which requires an account to access.
It must be remembered that two years ago, Red Hat decided to redirect its investments in CentOS to another version called CentOS Stream. The latter has been around since September 2019 and serves as "a taster of what's to come in Red Hat Enterprise Linux," as a pre-test to test features that will be present in RHEL a year from now.
Red Hat mentions that the reason of said change is for the purpose of «promote the evolution of CentOS Stream”, but without taking into account the effects that this entails to the various projects that depend on the base of these packages.
In his blog post Mike McGrath, vice president of core platform engineering at Red Hat, shares the following:
As the CentOS Stream community grows and the world of enterprise software embraces new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of Linux enterprise innovation. We continue to invest in and increase our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the only repository for RHEL-related public source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, the source code will remain available through the Red Hat Customer Portal.
To be clear, this change does not mean any change to CentOS Project, CentOS Stream, or font availability for CentOS Stream or CentOS SIG.
It is mentioned that for CentOS and CentOS Stream projects, the new source distribution model will not generate noticeable changes, but third-party distributions such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux and EuroLinux, created by rebuilding RHEL packages, will have to significantly rethink their development processes or gain access through workarounds for packaging the code of RHEL releases.
The gist of the changes is that the package source code for the already released versions has been posted on git.centos.org, and the package code for the yet to be released versions is being developed in the CentOS Stream repository. i.e. CentOS Stream acts as a continuously updated base for RHEL development, which is not fully compatible with RHEL in binary (CentOS Stream can be thought of as RHEL nightly test builds).
Why make this change?
Prior to CentOS Stream, Red Hat posted public RHEL sources to git.centos.org. When the CentOS Project switched to focus on CentOS Stream, we kept these repositories even though CentOS Linux was no longer built downstream of RHEL. The commitment around CentOS Stream, the levels of investment engineering, and the new priorities we are addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate and redundant repositories inefficient. The latest source code will continue to be available via CentOS Stream.
The cessation of publishing packages on git.centos.org is due to the fact that the CentOS distribution has been transformed into CentOS Stream and is no longer built from the source of RHEL packages. CentOS Stream is presented as a recommended and priority project, and maintaining separate repositories is considered inefficient.
It is worth mentioning that this latest decision by Red Hat has provoked reactions in the forums regarding the various forks of CentOS. Like two years ago, people talk about treason and violation of the terms of the GPL license, something that the SFC has already promoted (you can check the post about it this link).
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.