Rocky Linux
The astute reader will note that my last update was in early December. That was only a couple of weeks before I (and the other members of our team) co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS.
Rocky Linux - the free, open source, community enterprise operating system
Before I go on, I should say that the viewpoints expressed here are my own, and do not represent any entity or organization, including the RESF, where I am the Director of Operations.
What does it take to stand up a free, open source, community enterprise operating system? A whole lot, as it happens. But we did it. And now we have Rocky Linux.
Just a little history: IBM owns Red Hat, the company behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat owns CentOS, which (formerly?) stands for Community Enterprise Operating System. CentOS is a free, open source clone of RHEL. It used to be that CentOS was downstream of RHEL, which meant all the bugs and stability would be worked out in RHEL, and then passed down to CentOS users, who could enjoy ten years of support on a stable, solid, enterprise OS.
Everything changed when RHEL killed CentOS and made CentOS Stream, which lives upstream of RHEL. They also announced that CentOS 8 would no longer be receiving support after the end of the year instead of what users were expecting, which was the end of 2029. This is a big deal in the world of enterprise users who need guaranteed stability and long term support.
Just how big of a deal is this? Well, CERN and Fermilab made a joint briefing on it public—and they called out Rocky as an option.
In the very same blog post where Red Hat announced the change, Greg Kurtzer commented that he’d be down with starting up a new distribution, and if people were interested in chatting with him about it, then they could join his Slack.
In a matter of weeks, we had over ten thousand people within the community join the Slack workspace. We stood up a number of teams around everything from infrastructure, security, and release engineering to branding, website, and communication. The community quickly rallied.
By February—only a couple of months after the announcement of our intention to build Rocky Linux—we had counted over sixty million impressions across our various social media platforms, news links, and articles.
After five or six months of work (including a few weeks of all-nighters, things I haven’t pulled since even my undergrad days), we now have a release candidate for Rocky for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
I’m skeptical how quickly this could have happened without Kurtzer, and the backing of his company CIQ (which also offers paid support for Rocky, as the founding partner for support and services), which specializes in high performance computing. They’ve put forth a tremendous amount of capital, time, and good will to back the community in this. Kurtzer himself has gone way out of his way—and to great personal detriment and risk—to ensure that Rocky remains free of control and influence by any one organization (including his own), and that Rocky forever remains for the community, and by the community.
Could Rocky have happened without CIQ? Probably. As a colleague on the Rocky side of things put it, “we’re a scrappy bunch. We would have figured it out.” I’m sure that’s true. But without the recognition and the trust behind Kurter’s name for the community to rally behind? Well, perhaps the road would have been bumpier, and longer, at the least.
Ctrl IQ, founding partner providing support and services for Rocky Linux
I’m exhausted. I haven’t worked this hard in…well, I don’t know how long. Maybe when the kids were babies and I was working full time and going to school full time? I definitely do not recovery as quickly as I used to, but I’m slowly coming back up for air and getting back on track with all the normal parts of my life that got discarded along the way to building Rocky (writing, reading, running, talking with friends…), but what a tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime experience this project has been.
To see the community come together for the greater good like this, and to have been a part of all of it, has been one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences of my life.
There are exciting things ahead that I can’t wait to get into. StokerCon’s first-ever virtual event is this month, there’s a new Moanaria Fright Club workshop next month, and so much more. Stick with me, and we’ll talk about all of it.