Red Hat appears to be taking aim at two popular Linux distros that are community alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In a blog post, Mike McGrath, Red Hat VP of Core Platforms, announced that Red Hat is changing its policy regarding public RHEL-related source code:

As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

CentOS started out as a downstream, RHEL-compatible community enterprise distro. The project eventually joined Red Hat but remained independent. In 2020, however, Red Hat killed CentOS and announced CentOS Stream, a replacement option that is upstream of RHEL instead of downstream as the original CentOS was.

CentOS creator Gregory Kurtzer created Rocky Linux in response, and CloudLinux created AlmaLinux, both of which are RHEL-compatible downstream distros that fill the same role as the original CentOS.

Since Red Hat has no control over Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux, it appears the company is taking aim at them by restricting RHEL source code access to CentOS Stream. This will make it more difficult for Rocky and Alma to maintain the 1:1 compatibility they currently have with RHEL.

Red Hat has certainly been making waves in the Linux community. In addition to its widely criticized CentOS decisions, the company recently laid off Fedora Program Manager Ben Cotton. Fedora is the upstream community distro for RHEL and is a popular choice in the Linux desktop community.

With its latest decision, it’s a safe bet Red Hat will burn through much of whatever remaining goodwill it still had in the community.