Red Hat has announced the expansion of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) academic program to include a wider range of academic and research institutions. The move is intended to help better prepare students and other learners for future opportunities in IT-related fields.

While Red Hat has historically offered a low-cost option for academic institutions, it was only available to degree-granting entities.

Now, a much broader range of research and academia-related organizations can enter Red Hat’s academic subscription program. The idea is to make it far easier to access, run and maintain RHEL to suit their unique needs, whether it’s simply running a web server to underpinning a high-performance computing (HPC) environment.

“We feel that it’s crucial for scientists, researchers, educators and other contributors pushing for the next breakthrough, from healthcare and epidemiology to climate change and renewable energy, to have access to the scale and power of the open hybrid cloud. The open hybrid cloud starts with Linux, and we want all organizations working to advance quality of life at a global scale to have access to the trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” the company said in a post.