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.
Not a problem :) just answer directly next time. In any case:
It’s not that they became the biggest contributors out of nowhere you know. It’s not like they did it out the love in their heart and because of ideal, morals and ethics. It was seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to be left behind. Remember both Microsoft and Oracle tried to sue various Linux distributions and the kernel maintainers themselves because they claimed that they or one of their subsidiaries had intellectual property that Linux was using - which was patantly false (pun intended).
In modern times they push to prevent moving away from GPL2 to something like GPL3 because they’ve already gamed the license - especially Oracle, which allows them to contribute back as little as possible, and they couldn’t have done that if they weren’t benefactors and members of the Linux Foundation.
Some would even say Microsoft’s “embrace, expand & extinguish” tactic is still well and alive to this very day. And we’re talking about the company that has a history of hidden licensing fees.
In any case, I guess SuSE is more trustworthy than all of them - again because of historical presedence. But I’m still sceptical!
In regards to Microsoft, IBM and Oracle? I’m cynnical. But it’s deserved cynicism, because of the afformentioned historical presedence.
I’m not saying that people, organizations, companies, corporations, governments, multinationals, etc can’t reform… buuuut… yeah. All of these companies have a horrible history of patent wars and subverting consumers, as well as open source projects. Soooo… yeeeeeaaaah…
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.