CIQ, Oracle and SUSE Unite Behind OpenELA To Take on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Mike McGrath, Red Hat's Red Hat Core Platforms vice president, announced that Red Hat was putting new restrictions on who could access Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s code, other Linux companies that depended on RHEL's code for their own distro releases were, in a word, unhappy. Three of them, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE, came together to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). Their united goal was to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code." Now, the first OpenELA code release is available. As Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE's chief technology and product officer, said in a statement, "We're pleased to deliver on our promise of making source code available and to continue our work together to provide choice to our customers while we ensure that Enterprise Linux source code remains freely accessible to the public." Why are they doing this? Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ's CEO, and Rocky Linux's founder, explained: "Organizations worldwide standardized on CentOS because it was freely available, followed the Enterprise Linux standard, and was well supported. After CentOS was discontinued, it left not only a gaping hole in the ecosystem but also clearly showed how the community needs to come together and do better. OpenELA is exactly that -- the community's answer to ensuring a collaborative and stable future for all professional IT departments and enterprise use cases."

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