With the union of the distributions affected by RHEL, OpenELA was born
It seems that Red Hat's decision to restrict access to RHEL code, has begun to take its relevance and far from affecting distributions that are based on RHEL (which at first seemed), this has led not only those affected to take action on the matter, but also projects like SUSE, will join the support and is giving start of a movement that very possibly can have very good results in the future.
To put a little in context to those who are still unaware of the situation, I must remind you that at the end of June Red Hat (IBM) announcing changes to the way I would distribute RHEL code, which are basically rrestrict access to this and prevent third-party distributions (Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Oracle, among others) from making use of it.
this start I take Rocky and AlmaLinux to make changes to the build process of their distributions, at the time they commented on using Oracle repositories and even taking advantage of legal loopholes. After that, the changes they had in mind to make were reconsidered and AlmaLinux announced that it would no longer be 1:1 with RHEL and that the changes would not be noticeable.
In the case of Oracle, his hand did not shake y I strongly criticize Red Hat, something that for many was something they did not expect (mainly coming from Oracle). In his post, in addition to criticizing Red Hat, he mentioned that Oracle Linux would continue to be compatible with RHEL.
In the case of SUSE this basically disclosed that would create a fork of RHEL in support of the community and this would be a public domain project organized by an independent non-profit organization.
Now these distributions that independently had in mind to offer solutions to its users, have made the decision to join forces and with this Rocky Linux, Oracle and SUSE announced that they would work together for the creation of OpenELA, with the aim of jointly developing a base of packages compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
With this new partnership It is sought that the group of developers of the distributions join forces to work for compatibility with RHEL. Among other things, the project has generated a repository containing a set of shared source software that can be used to generate distributions that are fully binary compatible with RHEL, identical in behavior (at the bug level) to RHEL, and usable as RHEL replacement.
“Collaboration is critical to fostering innovation, so we welcome everyone to join this partnership and help us keep the standards open in the community,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE director of technology and product. “ SUSE strongly believes in making choice a reality. Together with the open source community, we will redefine what it really means to be open and provide a stronger future for EL. ”
This new repository can be see as the solution to the git.centos.org repo, in where RHEL components released for to be used in the distribution. He site of OpenELA will give know all tools which are necessary for generate distributions which can be compare with RHEL versions 8 and 9, and to be posible, a variant which it can compare with RHEL 7. In addition to the codes of source of the products, the community also offers the fundamental tools for generate distributions which are completely Compatible with RHEL.
Finally it is mentioned that Those involved agree to maintain the repository with high quality standards, using a completely open development process and ensuring updates and security fixes are released quickly.
The project is open, independent, neutral and controlled by the community, In addition, the management will be in charge of a steering committee made up of representatives of the community and members of the association. Decisions will be made taking into account the opinions of all participants and interested parties.
Any interested organization, companies and individual developers can join the joint work to maintain the repository. The source texts of the packages will be distributed free of charge and without restrictions.
if you are iInterested in learning more about it, you can check the details In the following link.