OpenELA is a trade association of Enterprise Linux distribution developers
Few days ago Oracle, SUSE and CIQ announced through a publication, their recent alliance in the creation of a new linux distribution qIts purpose is to provide organizations with sources to create distributions compatible with RHEL.
The new distribution OpenELA (Open Enterprise Linux Association), arises in response to changes made by Red Hat in publishing RHEL source code that was previously done on git.centos.org, to move to CentOS Stream as the only RHEL repository.
Red Hat advocated that the move was in order to focus more on CentOS Stream as a driver of innovation, and believes the move to CentOS Stream allows for greater transparency and openness in Red Hat Enterprise Linux development. But this decision was heavily criticized by the community, which sees it as a desire to exclude certain major players from open source.
But for many, this move to limit RHEL public sources to CentOS Stream, makes it harder for community distributions and enterprise distributions derived from RHEL, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, etc., provide builds that are fully compatible with target versions of RHEL.
That is why distributions such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux announced a series of internal changes and in their roadmap, in order to try to still maintain compatibility with RHEL. Since for his part one mentioned taking advantage of legal loopholes, while another would change to use Oracle Linux sources, which mentioned that it would continue to be compatible with RHEL.
That is why the association of OpenELA, has the purpose of promoting the development of distributions compatible with RHEL by providing Open Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.
It is mentioned that in this year, OpenELA is committed to providing the necessary sources so that RHEL-compatible versions can be created, initially focusing on the EL8, EL9 and eventually EL7 versions of RHEL, in addition to which the association invites other organizations and members of the community to join them in maintaining open development standards.
“Many large organizations have contacted us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL, which can serve as a starting point for compatible distributions,” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Linux development manager at Oracle.
By inviting other organizations and community members to join and actively contribute, OpenELA aims to build a strong community-driven standard that ensures fairness and balance in the EL ecosystem.
"Collaboration is key to fostering innovation, so we welcome everyone to join this partnership and help us maintain open community standards," said Thomas Di Giacomo, director of technology and product at SUSE. “SUSE strongly believes in creating choice. Together with the open source community, we will redefine what it really means to be open and provide a stronger future for EL.
It is worth mentioning that andThis OpenELA initiative is reminiscent of the then «United Linux» which two decades ago, was launched as an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, but OpenELA has the only difference that this time, instead of building a distribution to compete with Red Hat , is based on Red Hat.
The idea behind United Linux was to merge the strengths of these different distributions into one, while allowing participating companies to continue developing their respective distributions in parallel. This was expected to reduce the fragmentation of the Linux market, provide common ground for developers and software vendors, and facilitate enterprise adoption of Linux. The main goal was to form a serious competitor to Red Hat.
However, the United Linux initiative did not achieve its goals and was not as successful as expected. Participating companies have experienced financial difficulties and strategic disagreements and in January 2004, United Linux announced the end of the project.
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