SUSE Announces Free RHEL Fork to Preserve Choice in Enterprise Linux

The company will invest more than $10 million to reinforce its commitment to innovate and support SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
SUSE RHEL

In light of the Red Hat/IBM drama happening these days after Red Hat announced that it will restrict access to its public repositories limiting the forking of RHEL by community distributions like AlmaLinuxOS or Rocky Linux, SUSE announced today that it plans to offer a free alternative to RHEL and CentOS users.

SUSE already develops SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), a commercial RPM-based distribution for businesses who want to invest in Open Source technologies, but now that company announced that it will fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) using publicly available sources and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution that will be available to everyone without any restrictions.

“This collaborative effort demonstrates SUSE’s deep-rooted commitment to fostering innovation and nurturing community-driven development, and it reinforces the fundamental values of open-source software. We invite the community to actively engage and collaborate in shaping the future of this essential software,” said Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer, SUSE.

However, don’t expect anything anytime soon because SUSE says that this RHEL fork will be developed over the next few years with an investment of more than $10 million US dollars. SUSE also expects the Linux and Open Source community, especially those relying on a free RHEL clone, to collaborate and actively engage in the development of this RHEL-compatible distribution.

“For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open-source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values. This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have a genuine choice tomorrow as well as today,”  said Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE.

SUSE also ensured the Linux community that it is committed to continue developing and maintaining SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE distributions. They are forking RHEL because they believe in “the open source community deserves choice and freedom from vendor lock-in.”

Image credits: SUSE

Last updated 10 months ago

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