There is no such thing as “community-driven” and “RHEL compatible”. If they are actually going to do their own work to create an enterprise Linux distro, it is not going to be bug for bug compatible with RHEL. The only way to get that is to copy RHEL exactly in which case any actual “community” contribution is a bug ( deviates from the goal of being identical ).
I do not love what Red Hat has been doing lately but all this cheerleading for these companies acting entirely in their own commercial interest under the banner of “community” has been very hard to watch.
Red Hat wanted to make it a bit more work to make identical copies of their distro and to water down the claims from copycats that they are truly identical. In response, some of the copycats have joined forces. This both reduces the burden on them individually and provides an alternative source of credibility that they can rely on. In the end, despite all the fireworks, barely anything will have changed for most of us. The mechanics of how RHEL clone get built have been altered somewhat but otherwise things are mostly as they were.
I’m kinda surprised SUSE is going in on this. They kind of do their own thing, so making RHEL-compatible packages seems a little odd. But whatever, as long as openSUSE doesn’t turn into Fedora, I’m happy.
A little over a week ago, SUSE also announced they would be releasing their own binary compatible RHEL clone with $10 million of backing. So it looks like they were planning to take advantage of this uproar from the beginning.
Oracle has been full savage lately. From their press release on the issue 2 months ago:
By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.
One observation for ISVs: IBM’s actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you. If you don’t yet support your product on Oracle Linux, we would be happy to show you how easy that is. Give your customers more choice.
Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden
I don’t think the shareholders care a whole lot unless stuff like this actually costs them customers. I am curious to know what some of the Red Hat developers think about this whole situation, though.
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