This is United Linux 21 years later. But this time, instead of building a distribution to compete with Red Hat, it's based on Red Hat (in practice, it <i>is</i> Red Hat).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux</a><p>> "No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome."<p>I'm sure they're trying to be cheeky. But it also comes off as confirming Red Hat's position. OpenELA isn't about community, it's about having a base (i.e. bug-for-bug RHEL clone) upon which to sell support contracts.<p>If you really want to stay in the Red Hat ecosystem, I'd suggest going with AlmaLinux instead. They seem to have a more honest understanding of what "community" means.<p>Some people are throwing the word "freeloaders" around. It seems clear that "freeloaders" are not people running RHEL clones, but indeed there are some "freeloaders" in the community.
Part of the justification at the time for getting rid of CentOS proper in favor of CentOS "Stream" was that poor Red Hat was doing all the work and spending all the cash in support of CentOS. Red Hat even went as far to say that the CentOS leadership (board?) was in full support.<p>Red Hat never allowed CentOS to have any kind of election. It was never a community driven project after Red Hat bought it.<p>So, very interesting to see these companies banding together to give us back CentOS by another name. It will be interesting to see what Rocky and Alma do.
Based on <a href="https://openela.org/about/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://openela.org/about/</a> this appears to be a source-only distribution. They do not speak of binary builds (just “buildable”), that's apparently up to the downstream participants.
Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros?<p>I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. If I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server. And if I believed RH was being intentionally hostile, why would I support them at all and not go with a completely unrelated distro like SUSE?
As openSUSE user, the only answers that I care from SUSE are:<p>- Are you going to kill Leap and Tumbleweed?<p>- Are you going to handle the "community" as you do with the openSUSE community?
I like this solution way much better. Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Maybe it's not too late to make a U-turn and join this new group so that Redhat alone can be responsible for contributing to RHEL as intended.
I remember when Sun Microsystems and AT&T teamed up in the late 1980s and Sun announced the next version of their OS would be based on SysV UNIX instead of BSD UNIX. Since Sun was this massive force in the UNIX market back then, other UNIX vendors formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in protest.<p>In many ways, Red Hat and IBM are the modern Sun Microsystems and AT&T, so it's not surprising that their competitors are essentially doing the same thing.
Probably a dumb question, as I'm not really on the enterprise side of Linux but: Isn't Canonical in the same business as Red Hat? Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"?<p>Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu?
Also on this:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769</a> (ZDnet story, 5 comments)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603</a> (Phoronix story; no comments on HN)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519</a> (ZDNet again, no comments)
I wish they went for a 501(c)3 non-profit, rather than a 501(c)6 trade organization.<p>The incentives between these two structures make a world of difference.
I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And tbh, these days, with whatever bad medicine google feels like foistering on us this week, Oracle are truly beginning to look more and more like the "good guys".<p>As much as any large evilcorp can be the good guys anyway.
So what's the story again? You either die a hero or you live enough to see yourself becoming the villain?<p>And now even Oracle is looking like the reasonable player?