With the union of the distributions affected by RHEL, OpenELA was born
During the month of August we shared here on the blog the news that Rocky Linux, SUSE and Oracle had joined together to create a RHEL-compatible repository, under the name OpenELA (Open Enterprise Linux Association).
Now, a few months after said news, it has been known announced the availability of a package repository which can be used as a basis for creating fully binary distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, identical in behavior (at the error level) to RHEL and suitable for use as a replacement for RHEL.
It is mentioned that the new repository is maintained jointly by the teams development of distributions compatible with RHEL from Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux and SUSE Liberty Linux, and includes the necessary packages to build distributions compatible with the RHEL 8 and 9 branches.
OpenELA today announced the public release of the Enterprise Linux source code along with important technical and governance milestones. OpenELA is a trade association of developers of open source Enterprise Linux distributions originally founded by CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE. It exists to encourage the development and collaboration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatible distributions by providing free and open source code for Enterprise Linux (EL).
As such, the OpenELA repository It is intended to be a replacement for the git.centos.org repository, which was discontinued by Red Hat. After the collapse of git.centos.org, only the CentOS Stream repository remained the only public source of RHEL package code in which Red Hat customers have the opportunity to download srpm packages through a closed section of the site, which has a user agreement (EULA) prohibiting redistribution of data, which does not allow the use of these packages to create derived distributions.
With the launch of the new OpenELA repository, it is mentioned that will be maintained with high quality standards, using a completely open development process and ensuring the rapid release of updates and vulnerability fixes. The project is open, independent and neutral. Any interested organization, company, and individual developer can join in working together to maintain the repository.
“When we formed OpenELA earlier this year, we made a number of promises to the open source developer community,” said Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development at Oracle. “With today's announcement of package source code availability, full onboarding, and formation of the technical steering committee, we are delivering on our promises and commitment to help and maintain anyone's ability to develop compatible EL distributions. “We are very excited to reach these important milestones and look forward to seeing adoption and collaboration around OpenELA expand.”
“We are pleased to deliver on our promise to make the source code available and continue our work together to provide choice for our customers while ensuring that the Enterprise Linux source code remains freely accessible to the public,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, head of of technology . and product manager, SUSE.
To monitor the association, A non-profit corporation has been founded, which will resolve legal and financial issues, and a technical management committee (Technical Steering Committee) has been created to make technical decisions, coordinate development and support. The technical committee was initially made up of 12 representatives of the founding companies of the association, but in the future it is expected to accept participants from the community.
Among those included on the steering committee are: Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS and Rocky Linux projects; Jeff Mahoney, vice president of engineering at SUSE and kernel package maintainer; Greg Marsden, vice president of Oracle and responsible for Oracle developments related to the Linux kernel; Alan Clark, CTO of SUSE and former openSUSE leader.
In the future, they plan to release packages for distributions compatible with the RHEL 7 branch. In addition to the source code of the packages, the project also aims to distribute the tools necessary to create derived distributions that are fully compatible with RHEL.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link. To access the repositories it can be done from the following link