Today, SUSE announced that it is creating a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and that it will develop and maintain an RHEL-compatible distribution. SUSE says that it will invest $10 million into this project over the coming years. One major open source company forking another major open source company’s project is equivalent to going nuclear. But there’s a reason SUSE is doing this now, and that it will likely be championed by many in the open source community. It’s a complicated story.
In its early days, open source was a movement — maybe even a religion. For the longest time, it was a playground of geeks and activists, building software in the open and arguing about licenses. But over the course of the last decade, it morphed into a business model, and ever since, there has been this tension between commercial interests — often driven by some of t...
