Wanna build your own RHEL clone? OpenELA’s got all the source code you need, ready to download for free.
Six days after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5, and a day after the release of AlmaLinux 9.5, the Open Enterprise Linux Association announced that it’s published what amounts to RHEL 9.5’s source code, although it’s being worded as “enterprise Linux sources compatible with RHEL 9.5.”
OpenELA is an association that was founded by CIQ, SUSE, and Oracle that says its mandate is “to deliver open source code, tools, and systems for the community.” More specifically, it’s purpose is to get around the restricted access that Red Hat has put around RHEL’s source code in order to make the code available to the public.
Although this goes against Red Hat’s liking, it’s not likely to take any legal action against OpenELA. That’s because the GPL, the open-source license under which Linux is released, requires that anyone using the code must make it available to others. In other words, if they make it too hard for folks to get their source code, their flagship product might have to become Red Hat Enterprise BSD or something — which definitely wouldn’t help the company maintain its profitability.
According to OpenELA, even though the availability of the code was made public today, it’s actually been available since last week. The organization said that the quick turnaround was possible because of an automation process that it put in place and announced back in July.
“OpenELA has automated the downstream distribution build process to help users leverage the benefits of the latest versions of enterprise Linux as efficiently as possible,” Wim Coekaerts, EVP of software development at Oracle and a founding member of OpenELA said in a statement at the time. “By making high quality source code easily accessible to the enterprise Linux community, OpenELA enables organizations and individuals to streamline the creation of their builds, while gaining the peace of mind that the code is delivered by a reliable and secure source.”
Oracle is mainly known for its business software, but since 2006 it’s marketed Oracle Linux, a RHEL ripoff that’s also available with Oracle’s own “unbreakable Linux” kernel. SUSE also markets several RHEL-based products, although its flagship operating system, SUSE Enterprise Linux, isn’t based on RHEL. It’s assumed that both companies rely on OpenELA for their RHEL-based products.
CIQ founded and maintains a close relationship with RHEL clone Rocky Linux, which it also rebrands and releases as RLC (“Rocky Linux from CIQ”), a commercial offering for enterprises that need vendor support. Rocky Linux developers have told FOSS Force in the past that they don’t rely on OpenELA code to build the distribution.
OpenELA’s code repositories are freely available to the public.
“Anyone interested in creating a downstream build can access the OpenELA repositories to access the sources they need,” Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ’s CEO and a founding member of OpenELA, said in a statement. “Since we don’t create the actual build and simply provide reliable access to the sources, we can move quickly and empower the entire open source ecosystem to accelerate the development and delivery of their enterprise Linux builds.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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