FinLinux OS is a 1:1 binary-compatible rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, stewarded by a nonprofit foundation and released at no cost, with no asterisks, forever.
Because FinLinux OS is byte-for-byte compatible with RHEL at the binary level, anything certified for RHEL runs unmodified on FinLinux OS — from hyperscaler cloud images to on-prem hardware.
FinLinux OS has no shareholders and no paywall. Decisions are made in public, on mailing lists and in SIG meetings anyone can join.
FinLinux OS began after the 2020 shift in how upstream enterprise Linux vendors distribute their sources changed the economics of downstream rebuilds industry-wide. A group of systems administrators, kernel packagers, and infrastructure operators concluded that production infrastructure — banks, universities, hosting providers, research networks — still needed a genuinely free, genuinely stable, binary-compatible option with no strings attached.
The FinLinux OS Foundation is a nonprofit trade association that owns the FinLinux trademark and build infrastructure on behalf of the community. It is funded by sponsorships and paid membership tiers, not by selling the operating system itself — FinLinux OS is, and will remain, free to download, free to redistribute, and free to use in production without a support contract.
Read our full storyx86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x — minimal and full DVD.
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Vultr, and generic OpenStack qcow2.
Minimal OCI images on Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry.
Vagrant boxes for libvirt/VirtualBox, plus a bootable live ISO.
Security advisories are published within hours of upstream RHEL errata, cross-referenced by CVE, and machine-readable via our errata API.
FinLinux OS ships and maintains its own SCAP security guide and OVAL definitions for automated compliance scanning.
Every release publishes a full SPDX-format SBOM, so you always know exactly what's in your image.
FinLinux OS's infrastructure — build servers, mirrors, CDN, and CI — is funded entirely by sponsorships and Foundation memberships.
Arctic Hosting · Helios Cloud
Granite Colocation · Porthub Logistics
Fjord Systems · Baltic Data Works
42 individual Foundation members
Point releases track upstream RHEL point releases, so package versions don't move under you between planned maintenance windows.
Community support is free forever. Commercial support with SLAs is available from independent partners if your organization needs one.
FinShift, our in-place migration tool, converts a running CentOS Linux or RHEL system to FinLinux OS without a reinstall.
The Foundation doesn't sell support contracts, but a growing ecosystem of independent partners does — so you can keep FinLinux OS free while still getting 24/7 coverage if your business needs it.
24/7 break-fix support, kernel live-patching, and extended lifecycle support for FinLinux OS 8 and 9.
Managed patching, compliance reporting, and migration services for regulated industries.
Yes. There is no cost to download, install, or run FinLinux OS in production, on any number of machines, indefinitely. There is no "community edition" versus "enterprise edition" split — there is one FinLinux OS.
FinLinux OS is built from the same publicly available upstream sources RHEL is built from, so it is binary compatible — software certified for RHEL runs on FinLinux OS unmodified. The difference is licensing and cost: FinLinux OS carries no subscription requirement.
Each major version receives 10 years of support from its underlying upstream release date, split into a 5-year full support phase and a 5-year maintenance-support phase, matching the model used across the RHEL-compatible ecosystem.
A mix of paid Foundation staff and volunteer contributors, coordinated through Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and overseen by FLESCo, the FinLinux Engineering Steering Committee. See Governance for the full structure.
Yes, using FinShift, our supported in-place migration tool. See the Migrate page for details and supported paths.
Absolutely — the same free image works equally well on a single home server as it does on a thousand-node fleet.
Yes — x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x are all built and tested for every release. See Download.
Through Foundation memberships and sponsorships from companies that rely on FinLinux OS in production. See Membership.