SUSE, the global leader in enterprise open source solutions, has announced a significant investment of over $10 million to fork the publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution that will be freely available without restrictions. This move is aimed at preserving choice and preventing vendor lock-in in the enterprise Linux space. SUSE CEO, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, emphasized the company’s commitment to the open source community and its values of collaboration and shared success. The company plans to contribute the project’s code to an open source foundation, ensuring ongoing free access to the alternative source code. SUSE will continue to support its existing Linux solutions, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE, while providing an enduring alternative for RHEL and CentOS users.
But they also say their fork will be RHEL-compatible, which means it’ll be a hard fork that needs to track RHEL’s changes in some way.