How AlmaLinux stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible without Red Hat code

We need to get off Red Hat base as "the enterprise".

Anyone who has been doing enterprise for a very long time will tell you the only ones that had their act truly together was SUSE. It took Red Hat years to catch up. But SUSE didn't have a stock IPO in the USA. Which IMHO, is what made Red Hat the "defacto choice" even though they were clueless early on (extremely clueless).

So, is SUSE the answer? Perhaps. It's closer to what Red Hat does today than something Debian based.

So, is a Debian base the answer? Again, it's more of a radical change, and there are questions surrounding the balance of being maintained and being up to date, does any Debian deliver that right mix for the enterprise?

Enterprises are looking for long term stability. But sometimes with bleeding edge (sigh). Sadly, due to "containers" we're migrating to an "all" bleeding edge society. The problem is that the end user end up having to "manage it all", much like the work done by RHEL or SLES etc. The ability to "manage it all" being suspect of course. But, welcome to our new container world!!

Anyway, if the end users are having to "manage it all" (quite complex), the need for an enterprise base may be moot. Still, the whole world hasn't gone into the more complex "managing it all" world of containers and cloud, so, I think there's still room for a long term stable running enterprise base with support and security fixes without the radical changes that come from purely "keeping up" with latest versions.

What I like about SUSE is that openSUSE Leap is SLES. And you can actually migrate an openSUSE Leap to SLES licensing. A path that was destroyed by Red Hat with their current direction (they no longer have this "run with this" until you're ready model anymore).

IMHO, the whole idea of keeping with something RHEL-like needs to end. Red Hat doesn't want that job anymore anyhow.