OpenELA: A New Initiative for Open Enterprise Linux
A new trade association has been formed to promote the development and adoption of open source Enterprise Linux (EL) distributions that are compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The association, called Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), is a collaborative effort between CIQ, Oracle and SUSE, three leading providers of EL solutions.

Why OpenELA?
The formation of OpenELA was motivated by the recent changes in RHEL source code availability. Red Hat announced that it would no longer provide free access to the source code of RHEL updates and patches, and instead would only offer them through a subscription service. This decision affected many downstream projects and users who relied on the RHEL source code to build their own EL distributions or to customize their systems.

To address this challenge, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE decided to join forces and create OpenELA, a trade association that will provide an open and free source code repository for EL distributions that are compatible with RHEL. The association will also offer tools and systems to help the community access, build and test the source code. The goal of OpenELA is to ensure a stable and resilient future for both upstream and downstream EL communities.

What is OpenELA?

OpenELA is a collaborative trade association that aims to encourage the development of EL distributions that are compatible with RHEL by providing open and free EL source code. The association will also provide an open process to access the source code that organizations can use to build their own EL distributions or to customize their systems.

OpenELA will be governed by a board of directors composed of representatives from CIQ, Oracle and SUSE, as well as other members who join the association. The board will oversee the strategic direction and operations of the association, as well as the technical aspects of the source code repository. The association will also have a technical steering committee that will manage the technical roadmap and priorities of the project.

How to Join OpenELA?
OpenELA welcomes anyone who is interested in contributing to or benefiting from the project. The association offers different levels of membership, depending on the level of involvement and commitment. Members can enjoy various benefits, such as access to the source code repository, voting rights in the board of directors, participation in technical committees, promotion of their products or services, and more.

To join OpenELA or to learn more about the project, please visit openela.org/join/.

Today SUSE, the company behind SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), announced it will fork the publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project.

Ever since IBM’s announcement last month that RHEL source code will be available only to CentOS Stream and to paying customers, Rocky Linux, Almalinux, Oracle Linux and all the customers using their distros have been trying to look out for solutions. While some of the loyal userbase of Rocky Linux, Almalinux and Oracle Linux have given out official statements on their respective Twitter channels that they have found a solution, there are some customers who feel that the suggested solution may not be viable and are still looking at other options including a possible migration to Ubuntu.

With today’s announcement, where one giant Open Source Enterprise is forking the source code of another giant Open Source Enterprise, this brings in a good enough choice for those looking for more stable choices from the industry. And with the $10 million commitment coming in from SUSE for this fork, they surely have taken IBM head on for a big fight in the Linux open source distro market!

Gregory Kurtzer, the Founder of Rocky Linux also chimed in that “The enterprise Linux community requires standardization, stability, and consistency”.

CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

By limiting the RHEL public sources to CentOS Stream, it will now be more difficult for community/off-shoot enterprise Linux distributions like Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux, etc, to provide 1:1 binary compatible builds against given RHEL releases.

If you’ve been following the way Red Hat has been moving CentOS from being a downstream distro to RHEL to making it the upstream community distro with the start of CentOS Stream, you’d know the major shift in Red Hat’s strategy to cater more to the paying customers and partners and killing the spirit of continuing to remain a community enterprise operating system.

“As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.” said Mike McGrath, Red Hat VP of Core Platforms.

We’ll now have to wait and watch the path that will be taken by AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, the 2 most popular community RHEL distros that were started since the time CentOS was moved upstream.

Both Rocky Linux as well as AlmaLinux have tweeted asking their community to not panic and a solution will soon be found.

To start with RedHat is most known for its association with RedHat Enterprise Linux and is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and CentOS Stream along with many other open source projects. Redhat Inc. was acquired by IBM in 2019 and is now operated as an independent subsidiary of IBM.

Why would the same company want to maintain 3 Linux operating systems?

To start with, all the 3 of these Linux distributions use the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) packages. Most of the packages can be used interchangebly amongst these Linux distributions. So in order to understand the basic difference between them, we need to first understand the difference between a community distribution (commonly called as distro) and an enterprise distribution.

Community vs enterprise distro

Linux as we all know is a free and open source operating system. Which means anybody who understands it well enough can develop features into a distro and add it to the repository for it to become a part of the upcoming release. This ensures that you always have the bleeding edge features in community based distro. However, it does come with a drawback, that the new features may not have been tested well, so an updated would be soon on its way. This causes stability issues from an enterprise perspective. Enterprises prefer to have fixed periodic update cycles with a long term support (LTS). This is where comes the enterprise Linux distro. Enterprise Linux distros are tested with wider audience, features are stabilised and only then are added to the final release.

Fedora release cycle

Fedora Linux falls under the category of community Linux distro. They have a release cycle of around 6 months with the support for the current version being valid till a month after the release of the next version.

CentOS Stream release cycle

CentOS release cycle matches with that of Redhat releases. The major version number matches that of the major release of Redhat, while the minor version number being the actual release update. Starting with CentOS Stream, it is now an upstream Linux distro to Redhat.

Redhat release cycle

Redhat is a commercial enterprise linux distro with fixed release and support cycles. Red Hat releases a new point version of a particular series every year and a major version after approximately 5 years. It offers 10-year life cycle support so you can better support long-term apps.

Upstream vs Downstream distro

The development and release cycle of a Linux distro can be compared also whether it is upstream to Redhat or downstream to Redhat.

The bleeding edge upstream is Fedora. Fedora matures into CentOS stream. CentOS Stream is a “continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora and Redhat distros. With CentOS only recently moving to upstream releases to Redhat, it will be worth keeping a watch on how often do the releases happen in CentOS Stream.

Since in upstream, CentOS Stream lies between Fedora and Redhat, it is expected to have releases more often than Redhat, however lesser often as compared to Fedora. CentOS Stream 9 releases will give a better picture towards this.

And then there are downstream distros which were launched after Redhat announced the change in the stance of CentOS from the earlier downstream distro to upstream, from its CentOS Stream. These distros are Rocky Linux (by the founder of CentOS Project) and Alma Linux (from the house of CloudLinux). They are also gaining wide spread popularity, as they track close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are as stable as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are free to use.

You can read more about whether to opt for CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux before making up your mind for your next installation.