CIQ, Oracle and SUSE today announced their intent to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.

The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability. In response, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE are collaborating to deliver source code, tools and systems through OpenELA for the community. 

“Collaboration is critical to fostering innovation, which is why we welcome everyone to be part of this association and help us uphold open community standards,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer of SUSE. 

“Many large organizations reached out to us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL that can act as a starting point for compatible distributions,” said Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, Oracle. “OpenELA is our response to this need, and it represents a commitment to helping the open source community continue to develop compatible EL distributions.”

Starting later this year, OpenELA will provide sources necessary for downstreams compatible with RHEL to exist, with initial focus on RHEL versions EL8, EL9 and possibly EL7. The project is committed to ensuring the continued availability of OpenELA sources to the community indefinitely.

OpenELA’s core tenets, reflecting the spirit of the project, include full compliance with this existing standard, swift updates and secure fixes, transparency, community, and ensuring the resource remains free and redistributable for all. 

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Hugging Face, the US-based AI startup that focuses on open-source machine learning, has launched an open-source alternative to ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat.

According to the company, “the goal of this app is to showcase that it is now (April 2023) possible to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT”. 

Clement Delangue, the CEO & Co-founder of Hugging Face, tweeted, “I believe we need open-source alternatives to ChatGPT for more transparency, inclusivity, accountability and distribution of power. Excited to introduce HuggingChat, an open-source early prototype interface, powered by OpenAssistant, a model that was released a few weeks ago.” 

He added that the current chatbot is a v0 with many limitations but the team is iterating quickly on the interface and safety mechanisms and intend to support the next rapidly improving open-source models. 

In this particular version of the chatbot, says the company, they only store messages to display them to the user, not for any other usage (including for research or model training purposes). 

“For now, it’s running OpenAssistant’s latest LLaMA based model (which is one of the current best open source chat models), but the plan in the longer-term is to expose all good-quality chat models from the Hub,” the company said. 

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