Oracle and Rocky say they will continue to duplicate RHEL exactly ( though Oracle never duplicated the RHEL kernel ).
SUSE says they will “fork” RHEL with it being a bit unclear if this will be a “bug for bug” copy or not.
Alma will base off CentOS Stream to create a distro that is RHEL ABI compatible.
Of all these, I think the Alma path best reflects the community values that everybody has been on about. The others are driven more by commercial interests than “community values”. That is ok, as long as you are honest about it.
> The others are driven more by commercial interests than “community values”.
The first time I read this line, it didn't sit right with me... but after thinking on it, you're not wrong. I don't think Rocky's choice to stay bug-for-bug is necessarily driven by commercial interest, at least not overtly.
One of the big benefits of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with a support-licensed "Enterprise Linux" is the fact that you end up with an incredibly broad user base running the same systems code everywhere, whether or not they're paying for support. This means that non-licensed systems are helping to uncover bugs and incompatibilities, and it also means that issues reported by enterprise customers and fixed by RedHat get filtered out to everyone else as a matter of course.
At the end of the day, yes: commercial interest is the common factor underpinning this mechanism. However in Rocky's case (as with the original CentOS before being EEE'd by RH/IBM) the conscious motivation is to build something that brings a maximum number of people together in pursuit of a stable, production-ready Linux distribution. And even if the result is "we do this because it helps our users make or save money," as you said -- that's okay.
SUSE says they will “fork” RHEL with it being a bit unclear if this will be a “bug for bug” copy or not.
Alma will base off CentOS Stream to create a distro that is RHEL ABI compatible.
Of all these, I think the Alma path best reflects the community values that everybody has been on about. The others are driven more by commercial interests than “community values”. That is ok, as long as you are honest about it.