| guide | In recent news, SUSE announced today that it will fork the publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution that everyone can use without restriction. SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million in the project over the next few years. |
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said: "Collaboration and shared success have been the cornerstones of our open source community for decades. We have a responsibility to uphold these values. This investment will keep innovation flowing for years to come and ensure that Customers and communities alike are not locked into a vendor, enabling customers and communities to make real choices today and tomorrow."
Many enterprise customers and the community rely on Linux-related distributions, and SUSE says it remains fully committed to investing in its Linux solutions, such as SLE and openSUSE. At the same time, SUSE believes that enterprises and the open source community should have options and be free from vendor lock-in.
SUSE plans to contribute the project to the Open Source Foundation to develop long-term, durable compatible alternatives for RHEL and CentOS users, which will provide continued free access to the alternative source code.