This free developer subscription was announced on March 31, 2016. Developers need to register for the Red Hat Developer Program and agree to license terms forbidding production use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription is available at no cost for development purposes. Examples include community-supported distributions like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, and commercial forks like Oracle Linux. Third-party derivatives can be built and redistributed by stripping away non-free components like Red Hat's trademarks. Red Hat uses strict trademark rules to restrict free re-distribution of their officially supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux but still freely provides its source code. In 2003, Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS' and added two more variants, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS. The first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to bear the name originally came onto the market as 'Red Hat Linux Advanced Server'.

All of Red Hat's official support and training, together with the Red Hat Certification Program, focuses on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Fedora Linux serves as its upstream source. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Various free software licenses, plus proprietary binary blobs yumex, dnfdragora, GNOME Software (graphical front-ends).

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