TLDR: SUSE plans on investing $10+ million over the next several years on developing a free binary compatible RHEL fork.
They expect and encourage community input during the development.
SUSE will also continue maintaining SUSE Linux Enterprise, naturally.
Idk, one is investing in keep an decent open source RHEL compatible and the other is the opposite maybe they are not literally the same. You are traveling in a dangerous zone of the “if”. You can conjecture anything in the “if” zone
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Because for me it misses the point entirely, but answering your question directly: if you need some kind of “enterprise level” support you just have to “trust” some company, you have no choice, for full paying customers red hat is still ok and SUSE will fulfill the remaining needs. But if you don´t need extensive third-party support and don´t wanna be held hostage by the goodwill of some bullshit corpo you should be using Debian for a long time.
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Sorry about that but Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other gigantic corpo are already the biggest contributors to the kernel, key projects like wayland and gcc are maintained almost entirely by red hat (now IBM) so we are already in this situation. Although thanks to amazing maintainers we still have these beautiful community distros: Mint, Arch, and Debian Linux, if you don´t need any fancy support these ones already give you all you need.
Don’t get me wrong I hate what Red Hat did, but Suse is offering an alternative for everyone that was using RHEL without official support and so what? If you need a big company support, accept with happiness what Suse had to offer. If you don´t Debian, was and will be always there for your servers.
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And I don’t disagree with you in any way. But for me, a merely mortal the answer for your first question still is simple, the only thing we can do is stay away from company distros is if we can as I personally always have been, but if you can’t, probably everything will be fine too cause as you already said, these companies already did shady things but we are still here. The Linux kernel is too big to be completely destroyed by just one company, And as you can see, if one try, another will take their place.