Can someone please explain like I'm five the controversy involving Oracle, Red Hat, and SUSE?

I may be missing or be incorrect on some aspects, but afaik, here’s the situation.

Red Hat has an enterprise Linux (RHEL), which costs money to use. However, they also had centos, which is exactly the same as rhel, but doesn’t include any support. Since it is exactly the same as a high quality enterprise Linux, many people running servers used it, because you know any bugs would be fixed in rhel and would come to centos as a result.

Recently, red hat decided that they don’t want to provide a 1:1 match between rhel and centos, so stopped serving centos, and created something called centos stream, which is somewhat like Opensuse tumbleweed vs leap. Many people didn’t like this, but since the source code for rhel is open source, many new Linux distributions like alma, rocky etc. popped up that basically provided a 1:1 rhel compatible distro using the rhel GitHub.

Now last week, red hat decided that they don’t want to provide free access to the rhel source code either, so alma and rocky would have to pay for access to the rhel code. The community got angry that red hat is taking Linux itself (which is open source) and makes people pay for it. Red had argues that they already contribute heavily to the Linux kernel, and that it’s not sustainable for them to give a free distro of their bread and butter. Oracle, which is widely criticized by the Linux community for being a greedy company, said red hat needs to keep the rhel code open, and Opensuse has announced that they will provide a replacement for the centos distro.

Again, I have not been following this news as closely, so if I’m wrong on anything, please correct me.

Red Hats / IBM did this to themselves when they decided to kill CentOS. There are rumors that said Red Hat/ IBM was pissed that Rocky won a NASA contract, so they decided to pull the rug, stop releasing RHEL source code to non paying customers, and add clauses to their ToS to terminate contract with customers that redistribute the source code.

But you know what, if Red Hat/ IBM didn't kill CentOS, Rocky wouldn't exist. That NASA contract would've gone to Red Hat. Oracle Linux wouldn't be as popular (because people would use CentOS), and SuSE wouldn't provide free support to Rocky and Alma. Red Hat would still be the open source darling of the linux community, and IBM would still made a buttload of money.

Instead, they got greedy and think that all those CentOS downloads equals to lost RHEL sales (classic piracy equals to lost sales fallacy) and decided to kill CentOS to increase short term profits, which sprung Rocky and Alma (which truly eating their lunch because they also offer enterprise support). Red Hat didn't learn it's lesson and double down, and now have burned all of it's remaining good reputation in the open source community.
- Interesting. I had no idea about the NASA stuff (or most of your comment).
and makes people pay for it

Not that. The problem is that they are prohibiting people from modifying and redistributing it. It's not that they are making people pay for it.
- Alma and rocky were distributing pure clones, only modifying branding. It's a scammy business model, and I agree with red hat's stance, but less so their methods.

Here's an article that explains it well.

Glad someone asked. I was wondering about that just today and debated asking myself. I've been using Fedora for a few years and just installed a new SSD in the laptop. I decided to go ahead and try openSUSE again in light of the situation that I don't quite understand. 😅

EDIT: Plus all the proposed telemetry stuff with Fedora.

This will be a terrible answer to your question, but I recently listened to this episode of the Linux Unplugged podcast and they seem try to explain the situation from Red Hat's perspective. It sounds very technical, but it was interesting to listen to because up until then I had only been seeing anti Red Hat commentary online.

There is no any controversy – ditch rpm/RHEL based distro you use (if still on it). Don't get close to any other.

P.S. Last ~>10..15 years they had been causing unnesesary, no easy path, migration from one rpm distro to other, repeatedly droping support, making it a bad choise for servers and consequently for desktops and everything else.

P.P.S. from the practical standpoint - why should anyone care what they speak (thats just a PR and spam). It's what they do and how they impact matters.

I use redhat, it's free for developers,works much better for me than Debian stuff, and most importantly,is a modern Linux with proprietary amd drivers that work for my video card.

I also agree that rocky and alma are parasites that steal rh business.