SUSE, the global leader in enterprise open source solutions, has announced a significant investment of over $10 million to fork the publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution that will be freely available without restrictions. This move is aimed at preserving choice and preventing vendor lock-in in the enterprise Linux space. SUSE CEO, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, emphasized the company’s commitment to the open source community and its values of collaboration and shared success. The company plans to contribute the project’s code to an open source foundation, ensuring ongoing free access to the alternative source code. SUSE will continue to support its existing Linux solutions, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE, while providing an enduring alternative for RHEL and CentOS users.
How can SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility when source-code for future versions are no longer going to be publicly available?
Rocky Linux have said that they can rebuild using publicly available sources in UBI containers and cloud images.
https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/
Though reading the article, I don’t know if SUSE is simply rebuilding or forking. In any case, it’s cool to see SUSE committed to open source principles.
SUSE doesn’t HAVE to do that. That’s kind of a grey area. It’s legal, but kind of skirting things.
What you can do is get RHEL, take a look at all the packages and their changelogs, git history, find the code in CentOS, and then build your own from scratch. It’s a ton more work, Rocky wouldn’t have the resources to do it, but SUSE will.
Just realized, can’t do git history, because they wouldn’t package in the git files as that’d be internal to RHEL.
Thank you. The SuSE blogpost uses the word “fork”
But they also say their fork will be RHEL-compatible, which means it’ll be a hard fork that needs to track RHEL’s changes in some way.
The source code IS publicly available in CentOS Stream gitlab repos. The thing that isn’t public anymore is the pre-packaged SRPM snapshots of that code. This effectively means that if clone makers want to keep cloning RHEL, they have to pull from CentOS Stream and do some Engineering work instead of throw a script at a pile of SRPMS to rebuild them. This whole thing has been weirdly blown out of proportion in my opinion.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat so feel free the grain of salt my statements and flame me if you feel so inclined. I don’t mind people being upset about the change, I just want people to be mad at the right thing if they are going to be mad.