Changes to Red Hat's Source Code Policies and their Impact on Plesk

Situation

Changes to Red Hat's Source Code Policies and their Impact on Plesk

Impact

This communication is to address the announcement made by Red Hat regarding significant changes to its source code policies. This news was unexpected in the open-source and web hosting worlds and has raised concerns regarding the feasibility of rebuilds and forks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Plesk comprehends the significance of this development and is closely monitoring key organizations to ensure the provision of the most current solutions in the wake of these changes.

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board of Directors, in their public statement, affirmed their continued support for the AlmaLinux project as a stable and secure Operating System. Similarly, Rocky Linux expressed confidence in its ability to continue delivering a stable and secure OS.

Plesk Obsidian supports both AlmaLinux 8 and Rocky Linux 8 until 2029, as per the current vendor's End of Life (EOL) date.

Recommendations

In the interim, Plesk recommends transitioning from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 for two reasons:

1. The EOL of CentOS 7 is set for June 30, 2024.
2. The vendor of AlmaLinux has pledged to provide security updates as part of minimal support.

The suggested method for transition is via the in-place conversion tool, which is based on the AlmaLinux Elevate project. While this script is in beta, we will integrate it into Plesk Obsidian 18.0.54 starting from July 18th.

For the long term, consideration is being given to further investment in the Plesk Migration Tool during the years 2023/2024. The tool currently supports migration between servers with different distributions, such as from RedHat/CentOS to Ubuntu/Debian. However, additional time is required for testing to ensure robustness in such cases. Improvements for this are scheduled within this year.