Recently, CentOS officially announced that the CentOS series of stable Linux systems will stop maintenance and will be replaced by the beta version of CentOS Stream. This also means that CentOS will withdraw from the stage of history, which has caused strong dissatisfaction among CentOS users.
It is understood that Greg Kurtzer, the co-founder of CentOS, is one of many community members, and he is also quite shocked and dissatisfied with this change. Kurtzer issued the following press statement on Wednesday:
The news of Red Hat shocked me as much as the rest of the community. When I started using CentOS 16 years ago, I never thought that it would have such a significant impact on individuals and businesses that rely on CentOS to distribute Linux all over the world. In response to this unexpected change, I decided to announce a new project-Rocky Linux
Rocky Linux starred 4.3K on GitHub in just a few days, directly dominating the GitHub Hot List.
Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux". Kurtzer also gave clear answers to some questions about the project itself.
Question : Where does Rocky Linux start?
The goals of Rocky Linux As a downstream build, as CentOS did before,
Q : When will it be released?
There is currently no ETA to be released.
Q : What is the goal of Rocky Linux?
An alternative to a solid, stable and transparent production environment, developed by the community, Rocky Linux will not be sold.
Gregory Kurtzer is currently the CEO of Control Command. He has 20 years of software development experience. He has created and built a number of large open source projects and communities, benefiting millions of users. These projects include CentOS Linux, Caos Linux, Perceus, Warewulf and most recently ingularity.
Kurtzer founded CentOS in 2002. The project was originally designed to be a build platform for the new RPM-based community maintenance release Caos Linux. Later the project was designed to be released to the public and named Caos-EL (Enterprise Linux). Caos-EL was officially renamed today’s CentOS in December 2003. Acquired by Red Hat in early 2014.
I hope that Rocky Linux can keep its original intention and stop being acquired by other large organizations/enterprises, and eventually fall into the trap of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.