Similar goal, but is working more directly upstream with Red Hat[2] as opposed to the (as I last had read) undisclosed and non-open approach that Rocky Linux has taken.
1: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...
The Rocky people are antagonistic toward Red Hat and view them as somewhat an enemy (which seems so weird to me as without Red Hat, they couldn't possibly exist). They strictly want to take what Red Hat sells and rebuild and distribute it for free.
The Alma people on the other hand view themselves as partners and contributors to Red Hat's ecosystem. They want to make their product available for free, but they upstream as much as possible and add actual value to the ecosystem.
If you don't care about any of that, it's still better to choose Alma IMHO because their approach (following the letter and spirit of "the law") is a lot more sustainable than Rocky's exploit-the-system approach.
I think this is an unfair framing. Rather, they want to take all the GPL source code that Red Hat is obligated to make available, and distribute it freely. They believe this is in accordance with both the law and the software license that Red Hat agreed to, when using it as a basis for their business in the first place.
Personally, I don't have a dog in the fight, or a strong opinion on the matter. But we should at least fairly represent each parties position.
What they want to do, is do an exact rebuild of RHEL without having to go through the effort of putting the distribution together themselves, matching the versions that are used in a particular version of RHEL against what is available via CentOS Stream.
That's both spirit and letter. Don't fall for people making up additional terms that aren't in the license.
They do contend, that they are exercising their legal rights as enumerated in the software license that Red Hat agreed to, when it started to use and freely redistribute the work of others.
If you are denying they have this legal right, then I believe it's on you to explain and justify this legal position, rather than just asserting it as fact.
As I commented elsewhere, "RHEL" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually.
The sources for all of those packages, individually, are available via CentOS Stream just as they ever were - alongside the sources for packages that aren't GPL licensed, for which there is not actually a legal requirement to distribute sources.
What Red Hat has stopped doing is providing a git repo containing the exact combination of package sources which collectively make up one particular version of RHEL. Instead, all of the sources are still available, but if you want to rebuild the entire distro you need to match up the particular versions with RHEL. And that's exactly what Alma Linux does.
Rocky Linux contends they are not doing anything illegal in the methods used to obtain the source code (ie. legally renting an RHEL VM from any number of providers, and downloading the SRPMS).
Maybe Red Hat wishes this was illegal, but I still haven't heard anyone claim that it is.
> which seems so weird to me as without Red Hat, they couldn't possibly exist
If Red Hat didn't exist, they wouldn't need to exist. Nobody would need to test their stuff against RH, and nobody would need to run garbage that the upstream vendors only bothered to test against RH.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-...
Rocky and SUSE Liberty Linux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, which has become more difficult.
It's hard to read between the lines of the marketing speak but it sounds like it's just a suite of paid support options for existing RHEL/CentOS deployments and not a RHEL derivative that one can just download and use. Unless I am missing something?
Beware the Freudian slip.
As a user who almost exclusively uses rolling release OS-es, is this actually something people care about? CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora -- and Fedora is a rock solid base. It's not like CentOS Stream is riddled with bugs, broken features, etc.