Two years after making its JBoss suite of middleware tools free for non-production use, Red Hat Inc. is introducing the ability to download its flagship Linux distribution under the same terms. The move should make it much more straightforward for developers to take advantage of the platform, which has until now been fairly tricky to access without a paid support subscription even though it’s open-source.

Avoiding the expense required either manually building Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from the raw code, which is a tremendously time-consuming and complicated process,  or go with a community-implemented flavor like CentOS. The platform is practically identical to the official version from a functional standpoint, but lacks the distributor’s branding and other distinguishing features. As a result, the company’s new free edition will likely be able to draw away much of the project’s user base, particularly in the enterprise.

Instead of having to use a separate platform, an organization can now deploy the same operating system on its developers’ machines as the one powering its application environment without paying a small fortune for unneeded support subscriptions. Plus, removing the need to wait for CentOS’ maintainers to incorporate new code from Red Hat into the platform should let users access the latest feature additions, performance improvements and bug fixes noticeably faster.

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