SUSE Announces Its Forking RHEL, To Maintain A RHEL-Compatible Distro

Yesterday Oracle published an interesting announcement and doubled down on their intentions of keeping Oracle Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux following Red Hat's controversial announcement last month. Today is another very interesting response to Red Hat's recent shift, this time from the SUSE Linux folks.

SUSE announced that they will be forking RHEL. Yes, really:

"Today SUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, announced it is forking 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."

SUSE's announcement says they remain fully-committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE while acknowledging that enterprises and open-source communities deserve choice and freedom from vendor lock-in.

SUSE plans on contributing their RHEL-forked project to an open-source foundation and to ensure ongoing free access to this alternative source code.

SUSE also had a hand in the beer business for those unaware. Cheers to SUSE on their latest play.

More details on this surprise announcement at SUSE.com.