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The battle between Red Hat and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone distributors takes another turn as the Open Enterprise Linux Association announced that it’s made the source code openly available for RHEL 9.4 and RHEL 8.10.
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code already publicly available? I mean, Linux is the poster child for open source. Well, yes and no. In July 2023, Red Hat announced that “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.”
CentOS Stream is a continuously delivered development distro of RHEL. It’s not the enterprise-ready stable version of Linux. The RHEL clone distributors, such as AlmaLinux OS, Oracle Linux, SUSE Liberty Linux, and Rocky Linux, were ticked off.
AlmaLinux decided to work by Red Hat’s rules. It used the CentOS Stream codebase. CIQ, the company backing Rocky Linux, Oracle, and SUSE, elected to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). Its goal is to help create “distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code.”
As Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ’s CEO and Rocky Linux ‘s founder, explained at the time: “Organizations worldwide standardized on CentOS because it was freely available, followed the Enterprise Linux standard, and was well supported. After CentOS was discontinued, it left not only a gaping hole in the ecosystem but also clearly showed how the community needs to come together and do better. OpenELA is exactly that — the community’s answer to ensuring a collaborative and stable future for all professional IT departments and enterprise use cases.”
Red Hat’s Mike McGrath, Vice President of Core Platforms Engineering, insisted Red Hat has done nothing wrong. From where McGrath stands, Red Hat is still abiding by all of Linux’s open source licenses. The problem is from distributors and users “who do not want to pay for the time, effort, and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit.” He continued, “We do not find value in a RHEL rebuild, and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make.”
OpenELA’s call was to take the code and make it openly available. The problem was that extracting and making the code available wasn’t easy. The group’s developers legally access the RHEL source code via the Red Hat Customer Portal by paying for Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) container images and cloud instances.
Now, OpenELA has automated its process so that new enterprise Linux sources are available just days after each release of new versions of RHEL. Source code packages for the most recent releases — RHEL 9.4 and RHEL 8.10 — are now available.
With access to these GitHub repositories, anyone can build their own RHEL-compatible binaries. Kurtzer explained, “Anyone interested in creating a downstream build can access the OpenELA repositories to access the sources they need. Since we don’t create the actual build and simply provide reliable access to the sources, we can move quickly and empower the entire open source ecosystem to accelerate the development and delivery of their enterprise Linux builds.”
If you want to build it yourself, several tools make it easier. These include Rocky Peridot, SUSE Open Build Service, Fedora Koji, and the AlmaLinux Build System.
If you build your own Enterprise Linux distro and, if you want to, you’re welcome to join the OpenELA. Alan Clark, member of the office of the CTO, SUSE and a founding member of OpenELA, said, “If you create a downstream build, we welcome you to join OpenELA. The ability of OpenELA to move quickly in providing the sources to these releases illustrates to the open source community that now, with OpenELA, access to enterprise Linux sources is reliably available. This is central to the OpenELA mission: sharing with the world that these open source components are here for the taking, as they should be.”
Wim Coekaerts, Oracle executive VP of software development and a founding OpenELA member added, “OpenELA has automated the downstream distribution build process to help users leverage the benefits of the latest versions of enterprise Linux as efficiently as possible.”
While the code is identical, Coekaerts also said Oracle’s goal is to ensure a compatible userspace application binary interface (ABI) and API. “For applications to be compatible, an exact source code match doesn’t have to exist.” AlmaLinux, on the other hand, isn’t an OpenELA member and strives for ABI compatibility.
OpenELA will not be releasing its own distribution. If you want a Linux distro already based on the OpenELA codebase, check out Rocky Linux 9.4, Rocky Linux 8.10, SUSE Liberty Linux, Oracle Linux 8.10, or Oracle Linux 9.4.
Of course, as Red Hat will be quick to tell you, if you want Red Hat levels of support, you need a RHEL license, not a RHEL clone.
