A statement issued by Mike McGrath, vice-president of Core Platforms, on 21 June said that only licensed customers — those who buy RHEL — would have access to its source code.

He said the CentOS Stream — which was set up some two years ago and serves as an upstream distribution to RHEL — would be the only repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.

The announcement comes in the wake of the changes Red Hat made in December 2020, when it killed off CentOS, which for a long time had served as a means whereby people could use RHEL without the costs of support. It was merely RHEL without the trademarks, the only thing which was copyrighted.

When Red Hat said it was killing off CentOS, it announced that CentOS Stream would be the future of CentOS and serve as a testing ground for RHEL.

After the December 2020 announcement, a number of projects — Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, to name two — said they would now offer the same code as CentOS had done. Exactly what these projects plan to do now remains to be seen.

McGrath offered the following explanation for the announcement: "Before CentOS Stream, Red Hat pushed public sources for RHEL to git.centos.org. When the CentOS Project shifted to centre on CentOS Stream, we maintained these repositories even though CentOS Linux was no longer being built downstream of RHEL.

"The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we’re addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient. The latest source code will still be available via CentOS Stream."

Given that CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL, they will be exactly the same only for a brief period after a release of RHEL leads to synchronisation of their code.

Red Hat's community distribution, Fedora, is upstream of CentOS Stream which means that it will be even less likely to have the latest packages and bug fixes.

The change could have something to do with the revenue which Red Hat's owner, IBM, has been reporting for Red Hat. In the first quarter of 2023, the company reported an 8% rise in revenue; for the previous four quarters it was 18%, 12%, 12% and 10% respectively.