1y ago

SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment

www.suse.com SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment | SUSE

Investment reinforces SUSE’s commitment to innovate and support SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions and related open source projects SUSE plans to contribute its code to an open source foundation

TLDR: SUSE plans on investing $10+ million over the next several years on developing a free binary compatible RHEL fork.

They expect and encourage community input during the development.

SUSE will also continue maintaining SUSE Linux Enterprise, naturally.

24 comments

SuSe record with OpenSuSe is pretty good. I love their open build service. Nice to see them filling in the void IBM created by doing ibmy thingy to RHEL.

SUSE being mega based, Oracle being based for once. Alma & Rocky are also always based. This is great in terms of the open source community rn.
- It's stuff like this that makes me want to give Tumbleweed a try.

...but why trust SuSE? I want to leave RedHat as well, but wouldn't be going to SuSE just set up conditions for the same thing to happen again? Is SuSE more trustworthy than RedHat, and if so, why?
- SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
  Sounds like they're spinning this off to a separate legal entity which won't be profit driven. I'm not saying don't be cautious, but it looks like they're taking appropriate steps to work with the community.
  
  I think I'm going to try Aeon as my daily driver, even though zypper is laborious as hell. Let's see how long I last.
- Idk, one is investing in keep an decent open source RHEL compatible and the other is the opposite maybe they are not literally the same. You are traveling in a dangerous zone of the "if". You can conjecture anything in the "if" zone
  
  Also, you never answered my question. You merely dismissed it.
  
  Oracle, IBM, Microsoft. It's called market precedent. What's to prevent a major corporation owned by a venture capital company to turn around and do the same thing years down the line? What to prevent them from making this "open source community" beholden to members of the board from said corporation, similar to Fedora?
  "Idk man". Conjecture can be tempered by experience. Remember that.
- SuSE may, in the future, pull some stunt similar to IBM/RedHat; but, IBM/RedHat have already pulled those stunt(s).
  So, yeah. SuSE are probably more trustworthy right now.

It would be so cool if they created the Debian for RPM/Enterprise Linux and all the other distros from that "family" used it as a rock-solid upstream base.
- We already have it. It's called Debian.
  
  Yeah, and I love it. However, after knowing the deb and the rpm worlds for the 20 years I've been using Linux, I believe it is too late for these two sides to unite and work together.

In reality, if you're a mid or large sized business, it won't make any difference. My company continues to pay for RHEL for the piece of mind of knowing we get support (even though we never use it!)
I can totally see enthusiasts and small businesses going with cheaper options (aka free!)

I don't know if the 10M is a pun or something but it reminisce the same amount that Mark Shuttleworth pledged when he started a Debian fork project called Ubuntu.

24 comments