Red Hat today launched an initiative intended to make a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available to individual developers working within a corporate environment.
Chris Wells, senior director of product marketing for RHEL, said the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers program will reduce the level of friction that developers of corporate applications might otherwise encounter.
Red Hat already has a long-standing developer program that is structured around organizations rather than individual developers. Rather than needing to become part of a program set up by an internal IT organization in collaboration with Red Hat, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers program provides application developers with direct access to a repository through which they can download up to 25 physical, virtual or cloud-based instances of RHEL. Previously, Red Hat also made available a free personal RHEL license option to application developers.
The overall goal is to not only encourage developers to build applications using RHEL but also reduce the level of friction that might occur when applications are deployed in production environments that are based on RHEL, said Wells. Otherwise, a DevOps team would have to migrate an application developed on another distribution of Linux to RHEL, he added.
Red Hat now provides access to instances of RHEL that can be deployed using traditional package management tools or as an immutable container. That latter approach tends to especially appeal to individual developers who would rather rip and replace a set of containers versus trying to apply a patch each time a new RHEL update is made available, noted Wells.
There are, of course, any number of additional commercial services that application developers can also subscribe to if needed, he added.
As always, there is an ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of application developers. In the wake of changes made to how Red Hat makes its offerings available to organizations, Red Hat is now clearly trying to make sure that application developers are able to build applications on top of its operating system without incurring any cost.
It’s not clear how many application developers are building software on top of RHEL, but should application developers opt for a different operating system, Red Hat is concerned those platforms might one day supplant RHEL in production environments. Red Hat is also hoping that DevOps teams will encourage developers to build applications on top of RHEL to streamline application deployments.
Regardless of motivation, making it possible for application developers to self-service their own for building applications is generally a good thing as long as it complies with existing corporate standards. The challenge is that many application developers when it comes to tooling have a lot of personal preferences that often fall outside the scope of those standards.
Each organization will, naturally, need to determine how much freedom of choice they want to provide application developers, realizing, of course, that most of them have the resources and skills required to set up their own application development environments. Fortunately, it’s also not too long before most of those developers also conclude they would prefer to have somebody else manage those environments on their behalf.
