SUSE has reported that they have created their own fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company plans to invest $10 million in the project over the next few years. The fork, named Liberty Linux, will be developed and maintained as a publicly accessible project overseen by a separate non-profit organization. Initially, a set of packages compatible with RHEL will be made available for free to encourage collaboration with other projects. This new fork will not impact the development of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), and Opensuse, as these are still considered the main products and will continue to receive resources for their development.
SUSE is focusing on mixed infrastructures, where SUSE Linux, Opensuse, and distributions based on RHEL package base are used together. The plan is to provide unified technical support, a streamlined update delivery process, and centralized management tools based on SUSE Manager for such mixed environments. SUSE believes that commercial companies and open source software developers should have the freedom to choose and avoid being tied to a single supplier.
According to the CEO of SUSE, in his opinion, adopting proprietary models should not be seen as a competitive factor between companies that build their businesses around open source software. The fundamental principle of these interactions is that all companies contribute to the common cause of the community and benefit collectively, as the collective result surpasses the sum of individual contributions.
SUSE introduced the Liberty Linux project in January 2022 as an alternative to the now-discontinued CentOS 8, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The distribution was created using the Open Build Service platform and included a customized version of the Linux kernel derived from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Although the distribution does not include technical support from SUSE or the capabilities of centralized control provided by the SUSE Manager platform, it provides users with a viable option.