SUSE Takes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with $10 Million Investment

Red Hat’s announcement to put RHEL behind a paywall has been met with criticism from the open source world. Now, SUSE is taking a stand by forking RHEL and investing $10 million over the next several years. On Tuesday, the company published the plans in a blog.

SUSE’s Commitment to Open Source

SUSE is not abandoning its own distros. SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE will continue to exist and evolve. At the same time, the software developer is working with the open source community to build an alternative to RHEL.

Red Hat’s Acquisition of CentOS

SUSE’s initiative does not come out of the blue. Red Hat sparked bad blood last month by announcing that it is making RHEL source code private. Only Enterprise customers of the company will still have access.
In 2014, Red Hat officially took over development of CentOS Linux. This was followed by an acquisition by IBM in 2019. IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat was seen as a milestone for open source, signaling validation of community-driven innovation and the value open source brings to users.
In 2020, the announcement followed that CentOS would not be further developed, with CentOS Stream as a new offering. The latter will be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. However, in June 2024, the company will completely withdraw its hands from CentOS 7 and the Linux distribution will receive its last update ever.
CentOS Stream was named as a “rolling preview of what’s to come in RHEL”. The company cited good reasons for making this change, arguing that developer feedback could flow faster this way. But it also meant that CentOS and RHEL are no longer fully compatible and thus not ready to run in a corporate environment. So companies were channeled to the paid version of RHEL.

Independent Parties Respond

Independent parties responded by setting up their own redistribution. Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, for example, are the result of this, being bug-for-bug redistributions that are fully compatible with RHEL.
Red Hat broke ties with the open source community with its latest announcement, according to various parties. The announcement was already not well received by Oracle. The company accused IBM, Red Hat’s parent company, of trying to silence competition. Several Linux distributions build on RHEL. The innovation possibilities of such redistributions are now only severely limited. For example, Oracle itself has the Oracle Linux redistribution in its range and argues that IBM’s decision will lead to bugs and incompatibilities.
According to Rocky Linux, the consequences are manageable. The company responded with a guarantee that Rocky Linux can survive. Furthermore, the company underlined its commitment to open source.