SUSE Goes for the Fork After Red Hat's RHEL Announcement
In a bid to protect the publicly-available Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE will maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution.
SUSE, the company behind Rancher and SUSE Enterprise Linux, has announced it will invest $10 million to fork publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, says, "For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open-source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values."
He then speaks to the investment SUSE has committed to this effort by saying, "This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today.”
This all started when Red Hat declared that CentOS Stream would be the sole repository for public RHEL source code. However, with CentOS Stream being a rolling release distribution, it's not exactly suitable for business needs.
Gregory Kurtzer, the original creator of CentOS and the man behind the RHEL clone, Rocky Linux, had this to say, "SUSE has embodied the core principles and spirit of open source; CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard."
There hass been no mention of a release date for this fork, as it will take considerable time and effort to pull off.
It might take a few years to see the fruits of SUSE's labor, but with a 10 million dollar investment, you can be sure this is happening.
