SUSE Liberty Linux

Main Article: Operating Systems

2023: RHEL Distribution Creation

SUSE has announced the creation of its own fork of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution . This became known on July 11, 2023. Over the next few years, it is planned to invest $10 million in supporting the project. Fork RHEL, referred to as Liberty Linux, plan to develop and maintain as a public project overseen by a separate non-profit organization. Access to an alternative set of RHEL-compliant packages generated within the project will be free of charge to everyone and open for collaboration with other similar projects. Fork will not affect the development of SUSE Linux Enterprise, ALP (Adaptive Linux Platform) and openSUSE distributions, which are still perceived as the main products and resources for their development will be allocated unchanged.

Creating a fork in RHEL, SUSE relies on mixed infrastructures, in which, in addition to SUSE Linux and openSUSE, distributions based on the package base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are also used. For such mixed environments, it is planned to provide a single technical support, use a unified update delivery process and use common tools for centralized management based on SUSE Manager. It is noted that commercial companies and the community of open source software developers should have a choice and the ability to free themselves from binding to one supplier.

According to the head of SUSE, a shift to proprietary models should not be introduced as a factor in competition between companies building a business around open source software. The basic principle of interaction between such companies is that they all contribute to the common cause of the community, and everyone also benefits from this, since the end result becomes something more than the sum of individual deposits.

The Liberty Linux project was first introduced by SUSE in January 2022 as an edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, assembled using the Open Build Service platform and suitable for use instead of the classic CentOS 8, support for which was discontinued at the end of 2021. The distribution came with its own version of the Linux kernel, created by rebuilding the package with the kernel from the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 distribution. The distribution extended to SUSE technical support and centralized management capabilities using the SUSE Manager platform^[1].

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