OpenELA Commemorates One Year of Supporting the Enterprise Linux Community
In August of 2023, the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) kicked off with an important, necessary, and unique mission: create an organization that helps ensure the source code of Enterprise Linux is globally available to everybody as a buildable base. From its establishment as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit to preparing to welcoming its first members, several key milestones have been reached in OpenELA’s first year.
Open source communities want their projects to remain freely available, and they want the security, transparency, and reliability that comes with collaboration in the open. When CentOS was end-of-lifed, followed by the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) sources being hidden behind obfuscation and EULA penalties, the Enterprise Linux ecosystem felt the uncertainty at a visceral level.
Leaders at CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE – companies that each offer Enterprise Linux distros – decided to come together in true open source fashion and work together to create stability in the community at large. They launched OpenELA as a destination for anyone to get source code that is bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, including bug fixes, security updates, and changelogs.
In OpenELA’s first year an initial Board of Directors was appointed, featuring Gregory Kurtzer from CIQ, Wim Coekaerts from Oracle, and Alan Clark from SUSE. OpenELA bylaws were established, and industry and open source veteran, Arthur Tyde, was named Board Chair. The Board of Directors will expand to include elected representatives from new members as the community grows.
But administrative accomplishments were just the beginning. Code repos and automation were established, as well as binaries – for RHEL 9.4 and 8.10 and Oracle Linux 9.3 and 8.9 – with mechanisms in place to fast-follow on subsequent releases. Oracle contributed documentation and CIQ contributed Mothership, a collection of tools and services to archive RPM package source and attest to their authenticity.
Of course, the first year is only the beginning. In year two, OpenELA will welcome new members, publish new binaries, accept new code contributions, and look at models to provide certification for distributions built from OpenELA binaries. Join us and collaborate to secure the future of Enterprise Linux!