Linux distribution company SUSE plans to create a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, investing $10M into the project over the coming years
A storm is brewing in open-source land that could change the Linux distro landscape — Today, SUSE announced that it is creating a hard fork …
TechCrunchFrederic Lardinois
Context & Ripple Effects
SUSE’s move shifts a long-standing enterprise Linux rival from competing alongside Red Hat to funding an independent RHEL-compatible code path. It also extends SUSE’s enterprise infrastructure position following its acquisition of Kubernetes-management vendor Rancher Labs.
The fork became the foundation for a broader vendor response: Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ later formed the Open Enterprise Linux Association, and subsequently released OpenELA source packages for building enterprise Linux systems.
First-order effects
SUSE commits $10M and engineering capacity to maintain a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, creating a prospective alternative for organizations that rely on RHEL compatibility.
Red Hat faces a better-resourced effort to preserve a compatible enterprise Linux ecosystem outside its direct control.
Second-order effects
Other RHEL-focused vendors gain a potential shared technical base rather than each separately absorbing the cost of rebuilding and maintaining compatible packages.
Enterprise customers may gain more supplier choice for RHEL-like deployments, while vendors must demonstrate that their support, updates, and compatibility remain dependable.
Third-order effects
If sustained, the initiative could move enterprise Linux competition toward consortium-maintained compatibility layers, with vendor differentiation concentrated in support, lifecycle management, and adjacent cloud-native tooling.
The later OpenELA collaboration suggests that access to foundational open-source code can become a competitive governance issue, not merely a licensing detail.
The trend: Enterprise open-source vendors are pooling resources to keep critical platform layers interoperable when a dominant distribution’s code access or control becomes more consequential.
Here we go. After Oracle. Today, SUSE announced RHEL fork. SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment https://www.suse.com/...
Red hat blog that started storm https://www.redhat.com/... Oracle said they will set enterprise Linux free https://www.oracle.com/... SUSE announced RHEL fork https://www.suse.com/... More info from Rocky https://rockylinux.org/... Alma Linux https://almalinux.org/... https://twi…
And now @SUSE is teaming up with @CtrlIQ and forking Enterprise Linux... Paired with the @Oracle news, maybe @RedHat should be careful what they wish for. https://www.suse.com/...
SUSE's CEO, @dpvleeuwen, shares more about @SUSE's $10+ million investment into forking RHEL to develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution. We invite you to join us as we make choice happen for customers and the open source community. Read more: https://okt.to/y71uE6
Genuinely, I cannot recall a situation in which a *single blog post* resulted in a competitor introducing a new product to fill a void created absolutely unnecessarily. Doing absolutely nothing would have been the better move, at this point. https://techcrunch.com/...