Despite that I think otherwise, Some people think that OpenELA is a good idea for Linux. In this post we are going to review what the arguments are. We will also describe the advantages of this type of association for the software industry.
As we mentioned in previous articles, OpenELA is about the union of efforts of the companies behind three Linux distributions to maintain compatibility of your products with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
The importance of stability
In some disciplines, disruption is not only welcome, it is also inevitable. New scientific discoveries make the true false and vice versa. However, in others, such as law or industry, it is necessary to build on what already exists. Precedents must be respected and records kept.
To give an example. You can carry out a transaction with your bank by downloading the most recent version of its application using your latest model mobile phone. But at some point in the process, software developed before you were born and written in COBOL, a programming language created 10 years before man landed on the moon, will intervene.
This is because the task of porting the software to a more modern programming language and migrating millions of data to new databases it is an expensive and wasteful process.
Why OpenELA is a good idea for Linux
Banks is one of the examples. We have many other industries such as telecommunications, insurance or health where computers cannot be disconnected to install new software and do experiments. It's already complicated enough to install updates. And, let's not mention the big computers responsible for running the weapons systems.
Until now, Linux has been a competitive option for these large users and, much of it is the responsibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Red Hat is one of the oldest Linux distributions, although its transformation into a product for the corporate market only took place at the turn of the century. It adopted a subscription-based financing system, but the source code was available to anyone who wanted to use it. It quickly achieved great popularity as an operating system for large data centers.
This popularity and the availability of the source code hIt happened that distributions based on it appeared, although with modifications in the software collection and the visual aspect. Some of those distributions were community and free like CentOS, others paid like Oracle Linux.
Over time CentOS became the test version of Red Hat and the company, now owned by IBM, restricted access to the source code which is now accessed from the customer portal.
OpenELA is a foundation started by three companies in the pTo create an open platform on which to build Linux distributions aimed at the enterprise market. At the moment, its only members are CIQ, Oracle and SUSE, but they hope to have new members, both individuals and companies and free software communities. The new entity is registered as a non-profit entity in the state of Delaware (USA)
Although in the current version of the web Red Hat is not named (I seem to remember that in the first version they did) it is clear that the goal is to maintain compatibility with existing versions and gain users to impose their own modifications in the future.
For the moment, the management body will be made up of representatives of the three companies, although in the future they plan to combine corporate managers with those of the community.
Those who consider this good news for Linux say that the market welcomes not having to be tied to a provider, but at the same time not having to carry out a massive migration of platforms. And, it is corporations and states that have the resources for software development, which ultimately ends up benefiting home users like us.