The news of CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer's new project Rocky Linux to continue the stable version of CentOS has attracted the attention of many developers at home and abroad. In just two days, the Rocky project has won more than 2.6k stars. Earlier today, Kurtzer updated Rocky's project description information, explained the origin of the project name and answered some developers' concerns, and launched the project's official website .
Regarding the naming of the project, Kurtzer explained that the name "Rocky" was to commemorate Rocky McGaugh, a partner who founded CentOS with him. Unfortunately, Rocky failed to see the success of CentOS, so Kurtzer wanted to remember his former comrades in this way.
Kurtzer also gave clear answers to some questions about the project itself.
The first is the explanation of "CentOS changed direction". Kurtzer said that CentOS used to exist as a downstream build of upstream vendors (it received patches and updates after upstream vendors), providing developers with a stable version of Linux. And it will move to upstream builds (including testing patches and updates for upstream vendors) in the future. In addition, official support for CentOS Linux 8 has been shortened from May 31, 2029 to December 31, 2021. All this runs counter to the development direction expected by the community.
So where does Rocky Linux start? Kurtzer said that Rocky Linux will not change the route of Debian or other stable Linux distributions as suggested by some developers, but insist on continuing as a downstream build of RHEL like CentOS before. The goal of the project team is to allow developers to continue to use the stable version of CentOS.
Project official website: https://rockylinux.org/