Red Hat Releases Free RHEL Version for Developer Testing

To promote and grow its enterprise Linux offerings among business developers in the IT market, open-source vendor Red Hat has created a new version of its operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Business Developers, which it is offering at no cost through the self-service Red Hat Developer Program.

Developers can’t use the free version for production code, but they can deploy it on up to 25 physical, virtual, or cloud-based instances per registered user as members of the self-serve Red Hat Developer Program, according to the company.

The free version is available to developers across industries worldwide, including MSPs, ISVs, and other channel partners, Ronald Pacheco, senior director of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business and Ecosystem Strategy, told ChannelE2E.

“The role of developers continues to be influential across all industries, including among channel partners,” said Pacheco. “Channel partners deliver innovation and critical services to our mutual customers, so we want to make our partners as efficient and, frankly, as profitable as possible by putting a proven development environment in their hands.”

In addition, he said, “it’s an easy option for our partners to pitch to their customers, setting up a smoother path to RHEL in production later on.”

Getting RHEL into the hands of more developers is especially important now as companies work with AI, cloud, and other complex workloads and applications, he added.

“This offering is a way to seed RHEL inside more organizations, easing end-user conversations about standardizing on RHEL across development, testing, and production,” said Pacheco. “MSP partners are under pressure to quickly develop and deliver apps to their internal or external clients. By working with the RHEL Lightspeed command line assistant, now available in RHEL 9.6 and RHEL 10, developers of all skill levels can see, firsthand, how an admin learns what commands they need to invoke to address an issue as well as understand why the command was suggested with AI-driven RHEL.”

MSPs have a unique business model as they serve their customers and deliver expertise, said Pacheco, and Red Hat continues to support those missions.

“MSPs are all about time to market, so profitability hinges on developers’ ability to get solutions to market quickly that not only deliver the desired functionality, but are well-tested, secure and easily managed in production,” he said. “Leveraging a ‘shift left’ strategy and existing CI/CD pipeline investments for their entire stack minimizes time spent debugging and patching, reducing time-to-market and time to profitability for MSPs.”

Red Hat has worked with partners for years through its ecosystem and the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, Pacheco noted, offering hosted or managed services based on Red Hat’s Kubernetes and Linux technologies, along with hybrid cloud professional services.

What’s Included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers

The new free version provides simplified access to RHEL through self-service capabilities that allow up to 25 physical, virtual or cloud-based instances per registered user.

The free version includes curated and signed developer content, including many of the latest open source application programming languages, tools and databases that are used to build next-generation enterprise applications.

Also provided is access to Red Hat’s preferred open source container tool, Podman Desktop, as well as developer access to Red Hat software components for development and testing purposes, including the ability to create bootable container images.

Participants in the free Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers program will also be able to expand their use of the development environment by paying for a range of optional Red Hat Developer Support subscriptions for additional features.

Participating developers can sign up immediately to use the new version by entering a business email address, accepting the Enterprise Agreement (EA), and downloading the software, according to Red Hat.

Developers Weigh In on Red Hat’s ‘Try It Out’ Approach

Jack E. Gold, the president and principal analyst with J.Gold Associates, LLC, told ChannelE2E that Red Hat’s move to bring more developers in, even with a use-limited version of its software, is proof that it is a “highly competitive market out there for developers. What Red Hat and IBM want is more seats installed that they can ultimately leverage. And while the developer seats may be free, many of the back-end things that enterprises need to run production systems are not, so they can leverage that to get more revenue.”

Another analyst, Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, agreed that the free does remove some friction for developers to try it, “but developers still have to invest their time and effort into training on a platform which has limited additional commercial value,” he said.

“Those that like and use Linux are already on it – it is not a new operating system,” said Enderle. “If you want to get people to change platforms you need more than an attractive price, you need an incentive that covers the time and effort to learn what is to them a new OS and path to market. Generally if there is a market opportunity on a platform developers will pay the price to learn it, including the licensing price.  If there isn’t a market opportunity, free alone does not get you there.”