Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t as open anymore, SUSE, Oracle and CIQ are trying to bring an alternative to market. To this end, they founded the Open Enterprise Linux Association.

SUSE, Oracle and CIQ want to fill the void left by Red Hat with RHEL by founding the Open Enterprise Linux Association. Earlier this summer, Red Hat announced that it would no longer share Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code with the rest of the world for free. Red Hat uses the fine print in the GPL license to ensure that code can no longer be widely distributed even though it is theoretically open source.

However, RHEL is an unofficial standard for business Linux distributions with which other parties also want to maintain compatibility. Red Hat now makes that more or less impossible. Red’s not-so-open move led to a strange spectacle, with Oracle putting Red Hat on public display. That was a little surprising given that Oracle has thrown similar punches themselves.

Open ELA

Red Hat competitor SUSE is now teaming up with Oracle and CIQ (which makes Rocky Linux) to offer an alternative to RHEL. Through a fork of RHEL, the companies will attempt to maintain an open code repository for enterprise Linux distributions. This happens officially within the framework of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA).

The door at OpenELA is open to everyone. “No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Free riders welcome“, we read as a slogan. The last part in particular is an attack on Red Hat. The company claimed that it has benefited greatly from its investment in RHEL, citing this as an argument for no longer making the source code freely shareable. The claim was met with skepticism from the start, as alleged profiteers were never an issue prior to IBM’s takeover of Red Hat.

OpenELA is now set to become a new standard for Enterprise Linux that the rest of the world can use without needing Red Hat’s blessing. The participating companies strive to maintain this openness in the long term.