New Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers is available for free

Linux stalwart Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers. Designed for enterprise development use, the new platform is free of charge as Red Hat seeks to make things easier and more accessible for business development teams.

The new self-service offering is made available through the Red Hat Developer Program with the aim of simplifying an increasingly complex IT landscape. Red Hat is looking to assist development teams in building, testing and iterating on applications more quickly and on the same platform that underpins production systems across the hybrid cloud at no cost.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers comes without cost, there is the option of purchasing add-ons such as support subscriptions. As standard, it provides up to 25 entitlements per registered user.

Red Hat highlights three features of its latest offering:

• Simplified access to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform with the self-service ability to entitle up to 25 physical, virtual or cloud-based instances per registered user as a member of the Red Hat Developer Program. This helps mitigate friction with operations teams by developing business applications on the same platform that runs production workloads.
• Curated and signed developer content, including many of the latest open source application programming languages, tools and databases necessary for building next-generation enterprise applications.
• Powerful open source container tooling with Podman Desktop, Red Hat’s preferred container development tool for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developers gain full access to Red Hat software components for development and testing purposes, including the ability to create bootable container images.

In a statement about the new release, Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, says:

Modern developers need to be able to move at their own pace to deliver innovative applications, but must do so without increasing friction with IT operations teams or production systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers helps empower developers with direct access to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform without having to move through centralized IT channels, giving them a more consistent, reliable foundation that aligns with the business’ demands for production-readiness.

The distro is available directly from Red Hat here.