Red Hat, which was bought by IBM in 2019, said in its June announcement that RHEL source code would be available only to paying customers.

In a statement on Thursday, SUSE chief technology and product officer Dr Thomas Di Giacomo said his company had formed the Open Enterprise Linux Association along with Oracle and CIQ, the last-named being the company that is behind Rocky Linux, an RHEL clone.

The statement said OpenELA would encourage development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by providing open and free Enterprise Linux source code.

SUSE, the biggest independent open source company, said on 11 July that it would invest more than US$10 million (A$15.34 million) to fork the publicly available RHEL source code and make it available with no restrictions.

From 2002 until 2014, a project named CentOS was distributing RHEL without Red Hat's trademarks — the only proprietary bits — until Red Hat bought it and took it in-house. In December 2020, Red Hat shut down CentOS and created a development stream called CentOS Stream.

Oracle has taunted Red Hat about the June move, while AlmaLinux, set up after the December 2020 shutdown of CentOS, has said from now on it would only seek ABI compatibility with RHEL due to difficulties in obtaining source code.

While RHEL source code could now be obtained from CentOS Stream, it would not be the same as in an RHEL release as CentOS Stream is an upstream environment.

Source code that is available from Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution, would be even more outdated as it is upstream to CentOS Stream.

“Collaboration is critical to fostering innovation, which is why we welcome everyone to be part of this association and help us uphold open community standards,” Dr Di Giacomo said.

“SUSE is a strong believer in making choice happen. Together with the open source community we will redefine what it truly means to be open and deliver a stronger future for EL [Enterprise Linux].”

CIQ chief executive Gregory Kurtzer said: “Today's announcement marks the beginning of a new era for EL. With OpenELA, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE join forces with the open source community to ensure a stable and resilient future for both upstream and downstream communities to leverage Enterprise Linux."

Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development at Oracle, added: "Many large organisations reached out to us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL that can act as a starting point for compatible distributions.

“OpenELA is our response to this need, and it represents a commitment to helping the open source community continue to develop compatible EL distributions.”

Red Hat has not made any public comment about the formation of OpenELA.