It's always been easy to get started with Linux development. Download a distro, learn some C, and you were ready to go. But, to program for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you needed more. Sure, Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux, and CentOS, Red Hat's free server Linux, can help, but it's not the same thing.

Now, Red Hat is offering a no-­cost RHEL subscription, as part of its Red Hat Developer Program. This is as a self­supported, non-­production developer subscription. The RHEL Developer Suite provides programmers with a stable development platform for building enterprise­-ready applications.

Members of the Red Hat Developer Program can also get a free copy of the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio.

is offering a no-­cost RHEL subscription, as part of its Red Hat Developer Program. This is as a self­supported, non-­production developer subscription. The RHEL Developer Suite provides programmers with a stable development platform for building enterprise­-ready applications.

If you're building cloud ­native applications and/or microservices, this new development subscription also gives you access to the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK). This is Red Hat's curated container development tools and resources collection.

CDK users will also have access to RHEL Server and a local desktop instance of OpenShift Enterprise for development use.

The complete free package for developers includes:

● RHEL 7 Server.

● Development tools with long-­term support. Each major RHEL release includes a broad set of base tools that, like the operating system, are supported for 10 years, including Python, PHP, Ruby, OpenJDK 7 (1.7), OpenJDK 8 (1.8) and many more.

● Development tools with frequent updates.­ Multiple open source programming languages, databases, web servers, and development tools are updated yearly with the most recent, stable versions, and are packaged via Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset.

A Red Hat spokesperson told ZDNet, "This is a first for Red Hat, and is a similar approach to what we did with our Middleware portfolio in 2014. This makes it available to developers at no cost. What we've effectively done is given developers an enterprise-ready stack from the start -- using RHEL + JBoss from the get-go, this should help accelerate next-generation application development and speed up the delivery of these applications."

Sounds good to you? You can get a Red Hat Developer subscription today.

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