Today, SUSE announced that it is creating a hard fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and that it will develop and maintain an RHEL-compatible distribution. SUSE says that it will invest $10 million into this project over the coming years. One major open source company forking another major open source company’s project is equivalent to going nuclear. But there’s a reason SUSE is doing this now, and that it will likely be championed by many in the open source community. It’s a complicated story.