This new collaborative trade association aims to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code."

The OpenELA because of Red Hat's recent RHEL source code availability alterations and will provide an open process for organisations to access source code. This will enable it to build RHEL-compatible distributions. The initiative underscores the importance of community-driven source code, which is a foundation for creating compatible distributions.

For those who came in late Core Platforms, the division in charge of RHEL and CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."

However, this made life difficult for RHEL clone vendors, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, to create perfect RHEL variant distributions. AlmaLinux tried to work with Red Hat's new source code rules. Oracle restarted its old fighting ways with IBM/Red Hat; SUSE announced an RHEL-compatible distro fork plan; and Rocky Linux found new ways to obtain RHEL code. Now the last two, along with CIQ, which started Rocky Linux, have joined forces.