The Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) is committing to providing a platform for developers to collaborate on the maintenance of the 4.14 Linux kernel after community support ended in January. The OpenELA kernel-lts project is a repository that contains a continuation of long-term maintenance kernel releases hosted on kernel.org. This continuation follows all the upstream stable rules, does not target specific hardware, vendors, or users, and the patches are primarily selected from ongoing upstream stable kernels.

OpenELA is a trade association of open source enterprise Linux distribution developers originally founded by CIQ, Oracle and SUSE. OpenELA’s mission is to provide a secure, transparent and reliable enterprise Linux source that is globally available to all as a buildable base.

“The OpenELA kernel-lts project is the first forum for enterprise Linux distribution vendors to pool our resources and collaborate on those older kernels after upstream support for those kernels has ended,” said Greg Marsden, SVP, Oracle Linux, Oracle. “The enterprise Linux distribution vendors that are contributing to the kernel-lts project have more recent enterprise kernels that we recommend for most workloads.”

“As enterprise distribution vendors, we are often tasked to keep software viable even after community support has ended,” said Gregory M. Kurtzer, CEO, CIQ. “We believe that open collaboration is the best way to maintain foundational enterprise infrastructure. Through OpenELA, vendors, users and the open source community at large can work together to provide the longevity that professional IT organizations require for enterprise Linux.”