What happened on CentOS won’t happen on Rocky Linux: Kurtzer

Gregory Kurtzer, who founded and once led the previous open source project, CentOS Linux, and the organization where its initial development took place, The cAos Foundation, said today that a governance structure was put in place to sustain Rocky Linux. said. Public domain forever.

Rocky Linux development began in late 2020, shortly after Red Hat ended development of CentOS, a community-based Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that has existed since 2004. .

It is named after Jason Dale “Rocky” McGaugh, the talented programmer behind CentOS who died in December 2004 at the age of just 30.

When McGaugh was asked what he thought about the OS being named after him, Kurtzer said: IT World Canada“Honestly, he was a shy guy. I don’t know if he wanted attention, but at the same time he was a huge open source fan and a huge open source fan. I don’t think he liked what happened with CentOS.”

Kurtzer adds: We named it Rocky Linux because he pays tribute to everything he’s done with the CentOS project, not just open source and high performance computing (HPC).

“One of the last emails he wrote on the email list was that he was 99% done with CentOS development. I never saw it released.

According to Kurtzer, the key to any open source initiative growing and thriving is registering it as a non-profit organization, and that was the case with the caos Foundation. He did the same with Rocky Linux. A page on the Rocky Linux website contains the following details about its organizational structure: RESF is founded and owned by Gregory Kurtzer and is backed by an advisory board of trusted individuals from the Rocky Linux community and his team of leaders.

“The decision to bootstrap RESF as a PBC and create its current organizational structure was made collectively by an advisory board after significant deliberation. indicates that there is always a loophole.

“This is why we feel that the integrity, accountability and transparency of those involved in a project are the most important aspects in determining the long-term sustainability and viability of any project. The reason is.”

The rules are so strict that even the new organization, of which Kurtzer is co-founder and CEO of CIQ, cannot take ownership of Rocky Linux.

On Wednesday, nine cloud and Linux veterans form the leadership team of CIQ, a company building next-generation software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads on the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution. A release has been issued announcing that you have signed on to “

The company secured US$26 million in Series A funding in May and announced a partnership with Google Cloud in July.

Other members of the senior leadership team include David LaDuke, VP of Marketing, who co-founded Linuxcare in 1998, and Art Tyde, a 30-year open source veteran who also co-founded an IT services company. . He also founded his Area Linux User Group in San Francisco (and Silicon Valley) Bay in 1994.

Kurtzer said he wants to make sure even CIQ can’t take over the project, saying, “We’re not here to own an open source project or manage an open source project.

“We’re here to support Rocky Linux. We’re here to be part of it,” he said. “We don’t view open source as a business model or a marketing switch that can be turned on or off as the company wins. Instead, we view open source as a way we can work with the community.

“We can help, be part of something much bigger than ourselves, and really create value.”

The latest version, Rocky Linux 9, was released in July and will be supported until May 31, 2032. Rocky Linux 8 support runs until his 31st May 2029.

According to Kurtzer, the goal of the latest version was “to create a sustainable project that can last and sustain for decades to come, and to be an exceptionally stable foundation for anyone who wants to use it.”

Evidence that the initiative is working, he said, lies in the fact that “organizations such as Amazon and Google and other cloud vendors such as VMware jumped on the Rocky Linux project quickly.”