Following Red Hat/IBM's decision to restrict access to its public repositories, thus limiting developer forking of the RHEL distribution, SUSE announced that will offer a free alternative.
If you don't remember, here's a paragraph from a previous post:
The open source community was upset after Red Hat announced last week that they would begin restricting access to Red Hat Enterprise sources by placing them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal, and public distribution of the sources would be limited to of CentOS Stream. This in turn causes problems for free derivative distributions such as SoulLinux that cannot proceed.
SUSE already markets the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) distribution, which, like the entire SLE product range, is aimed at companies based on open source solutions.
So now SUSE has announced that they want to fork RHEL and make its sources available to the public, to be freely available to everyone without restrictions.
But we should not expect quick changes. SUSE says the RHEL fork will be developed over the next few years with an investment of more than $10 million. Additionally, the company relies on the Linux and open source community and hopes to actively participate in the development of this RHEL fork.
SUSE is committed to open source values and will continue to develop and maintain SLE and openSUSE. The RHEL fork is built because SUSE believes the open source community deserves the freedom to choose a vendor.
Red Hat's response, if there is one, will be very interesting, because the company's main argument has been that free refactorings of RHEL do not add value either to Red Hat as a company or to the open source ecosystem as a whole. They are simply depriving Red Hat of the revenue it has been rightfully earning by producing arguably the most stable of distros…
So now the fork comes from SUSE, which may be based on the RHEL distribution, but its contribution to the project and community cannot be disputed.
