Page 94 - Red Hat PR REPORT - JULY 2025

7/25/25, 9:59 AM The Best-Kept Secret is Out: Red Hat Confirms No-Cost RHEL is for Businesses Too – Licenseware

The Best-Kept Secret is Out: Red Hat

Confirms No-Cost RHEL is for

Businesses Too

July 23, 2025 / Alex Cojocaru / No Comments

In a move aimed at clearing long-standing confusion and countering the rise of community-driven clones, Red Hat has explicitly clarified its
stance on the use of its no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription. For years, a “best-kept secret” among savvy IT professionals
was that the free “Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals” could be used for more than just personal projects.¹ Red Hat is now
dispelling the fog, confirming that this subscription, allowing for up to 16 systems, is perfectly permissible for small-scale business and
production use. This is a significant strategic maneuver in the ongoing battle for the enterprise Linux market.¹
The “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” (FUD) surrounding the use of the developer subscription by businesses has been a persistent issue. The
very name suggested it was a tool exclusively for individual developers tinkering on personal projects. This confusion created a significant
opening for RHEL-compatible distributions like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, which offered a clear, unambiguous, and free path for
businesses that needed a stable, RHEL-like environment without the cost of a full support subscription. Red Hat’s clarification is a direct
challenge to this narrative, essentially asking the market, “Why use a clone when you can use the real thing for free?”¹
What the No-Cost Subscription Actually Offers

The Red Hat Developer subscription for Individuals provides access to RHEL at no cost. Under its terms, an individual can register up to 16
physical or virtual nodes.⁵ Crucially, Red Hat has now officially confirmed that these systems are not restricted to development and testing;
they can be used to run small-scale production workloads.¹ This is a game-changer for startups, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs),
and development departments within larger corporations. It allows them to build, test, and deploy applications on a genuine, production-
grade RHEL platform from day one, without incurring any licensing costs. This ensures a consistent environment from development through
to production, eliminating the potential issues that can arise from developing on one OS and deploying on another.
To further streamline this, Red Hat has also launched a new offering in July 2025, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers.” This
program, also at no cost, is specifically aimed at business-focused development teams and expands the allowance to 25 instances.³ ⁵ It
underscores Red Hat’s commitment to making genuine RHEL more accessible within corporate environments, aiming to reduce friction
between development and operations teams.³

https://licenseware.io/the-best-kept-secret-is-out-red-hat-confirms-no-cost-rhel-is-for-businesses-too/ 1/2