Third-party derivatives were able to be built and redistributed by stripping away non-free components like Red Hat's trademarks.

[10] Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription is available at no cost for development purposes.

[15] They are offered to schools and students, are less expensive, and are provided with Red Hat technical support as an optional extra.

Fedora is a general purpose system that gives Red Hat and the rest of its contributor community the chance to innovate rapidly with new technologies.

The Fedora Project began in 2002 as a set of community supported packages for Red Hat Linux.

The Fedora Project lists the following lineages for older Red Hat Enterprise releases:[23] In addition, the Fedora project publishes a set of packages for RHEL called the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is derived completely from free and open source software.

Until 2023, Red Hat made the source code to its enterprise distribution publicly available through its FTP website.

Speculation suggested that the move was made to affect Oracle's competing rebuild and support services, which further modifies the distribution.

[34] Red Hat's CTO Brian Stevens later confirmed the change, stating that certain information (such as patch information) would now only be provided to paying customers to make the Red Hat product more competitive against the growing number of companies offering support for products based on RHEL.

[35] Their competitor Oracle announced in November 2012 that they were releasing a RedPatch service, which allows public view of the RHEL kernel changes, broken down by patch.

[36][37] A number of commercial vendors use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a base for the operating system in their products.

[46] With Release 8 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM has completed transition of POWER8 and POWER9 servers to little-endian mode.

[44] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (Maipo) is based on Fedora 18 and Fedora 19, upstream Linux kernel 3.10, systemd 208 (updated to 219 in RHEL 7.2), and GNOME 3.8 (rebased to GNOME 3.28 in RHEL 7.6) The first beta was announced on 11 December 2013,[52][53] and a release candidate was made available on 15 April 2014.

RHEL 4 introduced Linux kernel 2.6 versions and extended attributes on ext2 and ext3 file systems.

During the first phase ("Production 1"), Red Hat provides full support and updates software and hardware drivers.

[80][81][82] The Extended Update Support (EUS) allows an organization / company to choose when they change to a new minor version.

There may also be extra costs associated with using the EUS repos/channels depending on the agreement the organization / company has with Red Hat.

The standard base channel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, which is the most recent minor release aka rhel 7Y where y is the latest greatest.

It is built from the open-source Fedora distribution and aims to provide a stable, secure, and enterprise-grade platform.

RHEL 9, released in May 2022, introduces several new features and improvements, especially tailored for cloud-native development, security, automation, and performance enhancements .

RHEL 9 is suitable for a wide range of enterprise applications across industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government.