Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ Co-Found OpenELA to Encourage RHEL-Compatible Linux Distributions

Oracle, SUSE and CIQ, the team behind Rocky Linux, are co-founding the Open Enterprise Linux Association. The three companies will jointly “encourage the development of RHEL-compatible Linux distros” with OpenELA by providing source code.

Oracle, SUSE in CIQ announce their collaboration in a press release. According to the three participants, OpenELA will be a partnership to “encourage” the development of Linux distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The three companies are therefore going to open up and make free Enterprise Linux source code available.

OpenELA will provide the sources “needed for the existence of downstreams compatible with RHEL” later this year. The foundation will initially focus on RHEL versions 8, 9 and possibly 7. The materials will become freely available and may be redistributed by anyone. The three companies invite other organizations and members of the Linux community to join OpenELA.

The creation of OpenELA stems from “Red Hat’s recent changes to the availability of RHEL source code,” OpenELA writes. “In response, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE are collaborating to provide source code, tools, and systems to the community through OpenELA.” All participants will also continue to work on their own Linux distributions.

Red Hat time in June that the RHEL source code will no longer become generally publicly available, but only offers it to Red Hat Enterprise customers. This makes CentOS Stream, the development branch of RHEL, the only publicly available repository where the source code is published. That makes it more difficult for other parties to develop and maintain RHEL-compatible distros.

Several alternative Linux distributions use RHEL, including Rocky Linux from OpenELA participant CIQ. While distro developers can still get their hands on the source code with a Red Hat license, redistribution limited under that license. The team behind Rocky Linux previously said it would like the change probably no major impact for the distro, as the team can obtain the source code through other methods. Oracle criticized in June to Red Hat’s changes. SUSE said last month that it will maintain its own RHEL fork and make it freely available.

2023-08-11 18:32:45
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