CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE announce a new trade association dedicated to providing source code for building RHEL compatible distributions.
The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability.
There is no such thing as “community-driven” and “RHEL compatible”. If they are actually going to do their own work to create an enterprise Linux distro, it is not going to be bug for bug compatible with RHEL. The only way to get that is to copy RHEL exactly in which case any actual “community” contribution is a bug ( deviates from the goal of being identical ).
I do not love what Red Hat has been doing lately but all this cheerleading for these companies acting entirely in their own commercial interest under the banner of “community” has been very hard to watch.
Red Hat wanted to make it a bit more work to make identical copies of their distro and to water down the claims from copycats that they are truly identical. In response, some of the copycats have joined forces. This both reduces the burden on them individually and provides an alternative source of credibility that they can rely on. In the end, despite all the fireworks, barely anything will have changed for most of us. The mechanics of how RHEL clone get built have been altered somewhat but otherwise things are mostly as they were.