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Highlights taken by ZDNET
- You can use RHEL now as long as you are willing to sign up for annual contracts.
- This program provides critical security patches, emergency bug fixes, and 24×7 technical support.
- There is no standard price. You will need to consult with Red Hat for your specific case.
It used to be, and it wasn’t that long ago, that enterprise Linux distributions offered 3 to 5 years of support. Then, starting in the 2020s, Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical, the top Linux companies, began to offer support for up to a decade or more. Now, Red Hat offers a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Long-Life Supplement, called “RHEL Forever.” It does exactly what it says: it offers support for any version of RHEL as long as you’re willing to pay the bill.
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RHEL Forever is not for everyone. Red Hat presents the new offering as a way to align the multi-decade software life cycle common in highly regulated and capital-intensive industries, such as finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government. That said, many companies are very reluctant to upgrade their servers, which is one reason why the long-standing CentOS is still not supported by many users. I expect that many of these businesses will be more than willing to pay for this new subscription level.
The new addition promises a decade of RHEL
This new offering comes a few months after Red Hat introduced the RHEL 14-year Extended Life Cycle, Extended Life Extension at the 2026 Red Hat Summit. It seems this wasn’t long enough for some customers, so RHEL Forever, which sits on top of the company’s existing RHEL Premium subscription, will now let you run RHEL forever and a day.
Positioned as the “top tier” of the RHEL lifecycle, RHEL Forever offers customers a continuous annual renewal option to keep certain releases of RHEL running with vendor support as long as they are willing to pay for it.
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By moving support away from the calendar, Red Hat says RHEL Forever enables IT teams to align modernization with critical business milestones rather than vendor lifecycle deadlines. The company says this can reduce operational friction by eliminating repetitive migration caused by lifecycle deadlines.
That’s what the Long-Life Add-On provides
The Long Life Add-on is available for any RHEL release, but requires an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle, Premium subscription as a prerequisite. RHEL Forever is sold as an annual extension.
Under the new category, Red Hat will deliver critical security patches for vulnerabilities rated Critical by Red Hat Product Security, selected urgent bug fixes, and 24×7 technical support. As with previous long-tail offerings, fixes are pushed back to preserve API/ABI stability rather than introducing disruptive improvements.
This follows after IBM and Red Hat’s Lightwell Network and Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier. These programs provide support for many open source projects.
Extending the already long life cycle at a price
Long-Life builds on Red Hat’s existing extended support story, which already includes a standard 10-year lifecycle and the new Extended Life Cycle Premium, which can extend support up to 14 years for major releases. Previous ELS Long-Life options for RHEL 6 have shown Red Hat experimenting with year-to-year extensions beyond the normal end-of-maintenance date.
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Red Hat isn’t the only one offering long-term support. Canonical now offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu Linux, while SUSE will support its distro for 19 years. I expect that other enterprise distros will follow Red Hat’s lead soon.
So, how much will it cost? Good question. Red Hat has not publicly disclosed its pricing. The company positions it as a negotiated, account-specific extension on top of an existing Premium subscription rather than a simple price sheet SKU. I suspect it won’t be cheap.
