The beauty of GPL. ;)
IBM/Red Hat cannot legally jail it. The GPL license was specifically designed to prevent that, and it has been proven in several countries that it holds up legally. This was such great foresight by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.
So what will SUSE’s plan be for the SUSE fork to maintain compatibility going forward - won’t they have the same problems accessing RHEL source code as Rocky and Alma to maintain compatibility?
The source code will still be available, the GPL2 still applies. As far as I understand, RedHat will publish the upstream code that will eventually end up in RHEL. This article can explain it better than I can: https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
The article says that upstream code in CentOS Stream has brief periods where it is in sync with RHEL around major releases. So rebuild distorts can access RHEL compatible code at those times.
What I don’t understand though, is how do the RHEL-derived distros stay in sync with “bug for bug” (or close as possible too) compatibility with RHEL proper between those release windows? That sounds like it would only be possible with access to sources for RHEL patches and updates. Which is now legally complicated to access RHEL source code. Taking patch code from CentOS Stream would likely differ enough from what actually makes it into RHEL to break the “bug for bug” level of compatibility. Unless there is some way accurately derive what goes into RHEL from CentOS Stream that I’m not understanding.
Discussions like this always make me happy to go back to look at the Linux Distro Family Tree
opensuse is one of the roots / oldest distros, along side debian, redhat and fedora.
Still surprised suse as a distro is around given the huge numbers of popular forks of debian and redhat.
Thanks for that, it's been a long time since I've poked around distrowatch
Huh, may be switching to OpenSuse in the future.
As far as I can tell, SUSE Liberty Linux will be the RHEL fork.
OpenSUSE is awesome. Just note that Leap 15 is the last version of Leap and details about its successor are still unknown. But if you don't mind the older kernel etc, it will be supported until December 2025, so plenty of time for them to have a robust successor!
It's certainly on my list alongside Debian. It's a shame, since my distro of choice is Fedora but I'll switch next time I need to re-install my OS. If they throw opt-out telemetry into the mix I'm dipping immediately. Sure, I could opt out, but I don't want to fuck it up.
That's good news, isn't it?
Yes. And this isn't a knee-jerk reaction from them. They've been working on a CentOS clone ever since Red Hat decided to make it more unstable and cutting edge. So it's quite natural for them to step in and do this.
Yeah based on the article SUSE is planning to contribute the Project to an open source foundation, additionally they are going to invest 10+ million dollars. Looking forward to see what open source foundation this is going to.
Seriously, fuck IBM for paywalling a source code.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
