OpenELA Commemorates One Year of Supporting the Enterprise Linux Community

By Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO, CIQ

As the open source community gathers in Raleigh for All Things Open, it’s an ideal time to celebrate OpenELA, one of our newest open source communities, and the valuable work it is doing.

OpenELA kicked off just over a year ago (August 2023) with an ambitious mission: ensure the source code of Enterprise Linux is globally available to everybody as a buildable base, without limitations. 

The impetus behind creating this organization was two-fold: first, CentOS was taken over by corporate control and subsequently end-of-lifed, and, second, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) sources were hidden behind closed repos, and distributing them is subject to customer EULA penalties which made the future of all downstream derivatives uncertain.

After these two developments, the enterprise Linux ecosystem felt the uncertainty at a visceral level. And as one of the creators of CentOS, I was appalled and spurred to action. When CentOS was initially end-of-lifed, I set out to create the CentOS successor, Rocky Linux, and directed the resources of CIQ, the company I had founded, to help both with the community as well as provide assistance to companies that needed it.

Then, in August of 2023, we joined with leaders at Oracle and SUSE — who, like CIQ, offer enterprise Linux distros — to work together in true open source fashion to create stability in the community at large. We started OpenELA as a place for anyone to get source code that is bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux, including bug fixes, security updates and changelogs. And even though the Rocky Linux community and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation had essentially developed its own solution for reliable access to enterprise Linux sources, we at CIQ were enthusiastic about supporting OpenELA for the benefit of everyone who relies on open, unfettered access to enterprise linux packages.

From its establishment as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit to preparing to welcome its first members, OpenELA has checked off a lot of development milestones in this first year.

For starters, an initial Board of Directors was appointed, including myself from CIQ, Wim Coekaerts from Oracle, and Alan Clark from SUSE. OpenELA bylaws were established. Arthur Tyde, industry and open source veteran, 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, and the first binaries were made available — for RHEL 9.4 and 8.10, 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 but we’ve already been able to collaboratively create stability for all Enterprise Linux users. 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. 

At CIQ, which is built upon a steadfast open source ethos, we are deeply committed to ensuring that CentOS “lives on” in open source Rocky Linux, shepherded by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), and that enterprise Linux source code remains freely and globally available to everyone through OpenELA. Please join us and collaborate to secure the future of enterprise Linux. 

If you’re passionate about keeping enterprise Linux open and free, we encourage you to support the work of OpenELA. Come by the CIQ booth 84 or the SUSE booth 91 at All Things Open and chat with us about it!

Gregory M. Kurtzer is a 25+ year veteran, advocate, and well-known figure in the Enterprise Linux, open source, and high performance computing (HPC) communities. After working as an HPC systems architect and technical lead at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—one of the major national laboratories run by the US Department of Energy—Kurtzer went on to start and lead several large open source projects such as CentOS Linux, Perceus, Warewulf, Singularity (now Apptainer) and, most recently, Rocky Linux. He now serves as Founder and CEO of CIQ, a technology company he started in 2020 that builds secure, reliable, and open infrastructure solutions at scale, with dedicated world-class support for a range of performance intensive computing and enterprise technologies. He also is on the board at the RESF and OpenELA.

LinkedIn:

The Featured Blog Posts series highlights posts from partners and members of the All Things Open community leading up to ATO 2024.