Here is the actual article title:

CIQ, Oracle and SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association for a Collaborative and Open Future

• New trade association brings together open source Enterprise Linux community
• It will provide an open process to access source code that organizations can use to build distributions compatible with RHEL

What I just read: "Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc." which seems like a good thing.

What I also just read: "A bunch of companies that couldn't create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux offering." which isn't a good thing.

Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don't get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don't know enough about CIQ but I'm sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is "Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL".

That is not a message to be celebrated.

Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?

On the headline “Red Hat is going to have a tough time”.

So, at the end of the day,Red Hat will have the exact same competitors they had before: Oracle, Rocky, and Liberty Linux.

Only two things have changed:

1 - All of these competitors have come out to make a big deal to reenforce that the best and most important enterprise Linux is RHEL. They have declared that the best they can do is copy Red Hat even when that becomes less convenient

2 - That the offerings from these companies may not “really” be identical to RHEL anymore because Red Hat no longer supplies them directly

So, the same competitors but not as good as before as measured against their self-declared gold standard ( RHEL ).

Why is Red Hat going to have a tough time?