While Recreating CentOS as 'Rocky Linux', Gregory Kurtzer Also Launches a Sponsoring Startup

"Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution," Ars Technica reports: Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor.

The Rocky Linux concept got immediate, positive community reaction — but there's an awful lot of work and expense that goes into creating and maintaining a Linux distribution. The CentOS Linux project itself made that clear when it went for the Red Hat acquisition in 2014; without its own source of funding, the odds of Rocky Linux becoming a complete 1:1 replacement — serving the same massive volume of users that CentOS did — seemed dicey at best.
In a statement Ctrl IQ notes the Rocky Linux community was already "in the thousands of people driving the foundation of the organization..."

And as for Gregory Kurtzer, he was "originally basing Ctrl IQ's stack on CentOS, but he needed to pivot, as did most of the community to something else. Due to the alignment, Greg chose Rocky, and has been asked to help support it." Ars Technica adds: The company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing..."

Wading through the buzzword bingo, Ctrl IQ's real business seems to be in supplying relatively turn-key infrastructure for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, capable of running distributed across multiple sites and/or cloud providers... Not all of Ctrl IQ's offerings are theoretical. Warewulf, also founded by Kurtzer, is currently developed and maintained by the US Department of Energy. Anyone can freely download and use Warewulf, but it's not difficult to imagine value added in consulting with one of its founders...

Ctrl IQ is one of three Tier 1 sponsors identified by the Rocky Linux project, along with Amazon Web Services (which provides core build infrastructure) and Mattermost, which is providing enterprise collaboration services...

Rocky Linux is generally expected to be widely available in Q2 2021, with a first-release candidate build expected on March 31.

And History Repeats Itself

[theshowmecanuck]

And like the first time, it will be the ones who want the free system copied from someone else's work. And then will be scrambling when there isn't anyone to maintain it once it gets eaten again, or the rules from above change and it can't copy anymore or so easily. It's like apps that base themselves off of the Facebook API or the social media flavour of the week, and then get pissed off users who dump them when the actual source system changes the API, or cuts it off entirely, or beats them at their own g

Re:And History Repeats Itself

[Amiga Trombone]

That's what RedHat agreed to when they based their product on GPL licensed software.

Re:

[longk]

I don't think RedHat is the one complaining. CentOS got massive numbers of engineers and servers hooked into what was essentially RedHat. All RedHat had to do was buy and kill CentOS when it became a potential risk. I'm pretty sure not every CentOS user is now "scrambling". Those that can afford it can simply upgrade to RedHat. The ones who can't afford it aren't of interest to RedHat to begin with.

The real downside here is for all the other distributions. Including, and maybe especially, the free ones. Ima

Re:

[Zak3056]

All RedHat had to do was buy and kill CentOS when it became a potential risk.

You are revising history. CentOS was already dead when they couldn't produce CentOS 6.

Imagine all the resources that were put into CentOS had been put in Debian

Probably doesn't do much for Debian. While packaging CentOS is a shitload of work, it pales in comparison to running a distro like Debian. CentOS "just" has to build and package everything that has already been rebuilt and tested by upstream. Debian is an engineering effort on par with RHEL itself. The level of effort in the first doesn't make much of a dent in the second.

Re:

[pak9rabid]

I myself prefer Debian (and it's derivatives), however there was/is a real need to run a RedHat-compatible OS in a production environment that's compatible with binary-only drivers that were supplied and only supported on RHEL (think stuff like EMC PowerPath, OCFS2 filesystem (the specific version(s) compatible with Oracle RDMS, etc). For those that don't need the support offered by RedHat (aside from access to their Yum repos), something like CentOS was a perfect fit and served us well.

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

And history will now indeed repeat itself: Rocky Linux will be drawing people away from actual open source projects and prepping them to join the Red Hat camp.

This, exactly. As I was reading TFS I was feeling pretty hopeful, but they lost me at AWS. Why would anybody think partnering with Amazon would be any better in any way than partnering with Red Hat?

Re:

[ebh]

Because Amazon, for all its evils, isn't IBM. More than once I've had to deal with products I like being acquired by IBM then assimilated into the dystopian hellscape that is IBM's marketing and sales. I'd be willing to bet that if Red Hat were not part of IBM, CentOS would have been left alone.

Re:

[Tough Love]

if Red Hat were not part of IBM, CentOS would have been left alone

You're right. Redhat on its own would not have been stupid enough to "buy" Centos because they understand that the inevitable re-fork would just lead back to the same situation but with less Redhat influence over the project governance, plus a whole pile of bad blood from those ersatz RHEL users, plus a new wave of migration to Debian, Unbuntu and other distros.

Well, it's all for the better anyway because RHEL sucks, rpm sucks, friends don't let friends do rpm.

Re:

[Etcetera]

I don't think RedHat is the one complaining. CentOS got massive numbers of engineers and servers hooked into what was essentially RedHat. All RedHat had to do was buy and kill CentOS when it became a potential risk. I'm pretty sure not every CentOS user is now "scrambling". Those that can afford it can simply upgrade to RedHat. The ones who can't afford it aren't of interest to RedHat to begin with.

That's really the key here. The reason RHEL wasn't getting subscription upsell from CentOS users was because the RHEL subscription model is broken at scale. If I have 10K CentOS boxes and a SysEng team of 20 handling senior unix level tasks and engineering, and maybe 10 official RHEL boxes we use because a bit of third party software demands it, we're not moving all 10K over to RHEL at $300/year each -- that's absurd. Site licensing and internal mirroring were being begged for, and no one in sales seemed to

Re:

[Tough Love]

Everyone who's been around is aware of the free rider problem

Which one is that, the one where Redhat rides to multi $billion capitalization on the free contributions of countless skilled programmers then goes all soulless corporate on them?

Re:

[Etcetera]

Everyone who's been around is aware of the free rider problem

Which one is that, the one where Redhat rides to multi $billion capitalization on the free contributions of countless skilled programmers then goes all soulless corporate on them?

The free rider issue is that it still requires time and money to write and produce things, and no one engages in process purely for fun -- and process is what hardens products and services. "Giving back to the community", including giving the code back (as is required with Free Software), is great, but goodwill alone doesn't put food on the table. So all companies dealing with OSS need to have a way to monetize and continue their existence somehow. Red Hat codified the use of service contracts to fund opera

Re:

[Tough Love]

Redhat increasingly forgot about giving back to the community and ultimately paid the corporate death penalty for it. As time went by Redhat was less and less about contributing and more and more about controlling. Redhat's slide down that slippery slope got up to full speed when they ditched the community release.

Re:

[fulldecent]

Good analysis. I am guilty and fit into the problem actor in that story.

For me it was about using CentOS because that was available freely on Travis (now GitHub Actions) for continuous integration tests. What's the point of running a paid distribution in production if my development environment can't match it!?

But I believe RHEL will have more friendly licensing terms for these situations coming soon. And assuming my OpenStack host and GitHub Actions make it a one-click/one-line to start my next rebuild wit

Re:

[scalptalc]

But, like you say, it won't solve for people that freeload for the sake of freeloading.

As I recall my experience of Linux history that was part of the romance, wasn't it? The merry men taking on the bad guys, sharing the booty and eventually producing a damn good product. But the Free part never changed and the inevitable result is those freeloaders of yours. If, under the GPL ver.-something, all your work can be incorporated by others how will that freeloading ever change? I've read a crapload of threads like this and it's alwaysthesamestory; because it can't be anything else. Nobody can res

Re:

[Bert64]

RedHat itself is also based largely on other people's work, and abiding by the GPL is the condition by which they are allowed to use that work.
Personally i'd much rather run debian or gentoo depending on the use case, but some third party apps are tied to specific distros.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

This is essentially not a problem.

Some users will instead go to another distribution entirely.

Go through enough cycles and nobody will use a RPM-based distribution any more regardless.

Re:

[Junta]

Well, history repeats itself a different way.

A couple of decades ago, that the concept of a 'RedHat clone' was absurd, just use RedHat. It wasn't taken seriously on servers at first, but was a way for home desktop equipment to be awfully similar in many ways to those Solaris, AIX, and so on that were at work. Then as that enthusiast 'home market' got comfortable, RedHat launched into the more commercially viable server software business.

Then they said 'paying users only' and released Fedora to cater to the

Re:

[whitroth]

You are an ignorant asshole.

First, Linux is open source. ALL of it. A release is one set of selected packages. CentOS, and Scientific Linux, did nothintg at all wrong - go read the GPL.

Second, I know places that have a few RHEL licenses, to get support from RH. And the rest of their servers were running CentOS, because upper management is perfectly happy to pay through the nose for M$$$, but not for Linux.

Re:

[jythie]

Well, this touches on one of the big weaknesses of open source... people are not (generally) getting paid, and when one is not paid, one looks for rewards elsewhere... meaning social and emotional rewards, which tends to lend itself to forking and whining since getting to be the big fish with control is appealing to many people, rather than deal with the emotional hit of not getting their way.

Re:

[whitroth]

Or maybe, like M$$$ is coming to, they get paid for supporting it. You know, like all the years I spent as a sysadmin supporting Linux. And sometimes, their managers let them fix bugs, which gets rolled into the base (not me, but my manager, actually).

Re:

[SivDotnet]

I just read this piece at Tech Republic:

https://www.techrepublic.com/a... [techrepublic.com]

This looks to be a well funded fork?

Re:

[fulldecent]

Red Hat bought the name. So they control the usage of that name.

Kurtz-er?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

"The kernel of darkness?"

Re:

[kot-begemot-uk]

Curious minds want to know: Are his methods unsound?

Re:

[Zaraday]

I don't see any method at all.

Another distro..

[reloc]

Without RedHat support and internal business network , It'll be just another Linux distro. Strength of CentOS , besides being RHEL no-costs brother ,was on marketing level. On many meetings even non-technical managers knew what it is and that they can test it before introducing RHEL in organization. Now the fedora will become CentOS and CentOS will become just another distro for techs.

Re: Another distro..

[flyingfsck]

The way it used to be.

Re:

[getuid()]

Strength of CentOS , besides being RHEL no-costs brother ,was on marketing level. On many meetings even non-technical managers knew what it is and that they can test it before introducing RHEL in organization.

Honestly, it's not the '90s anymore. Even for "non-technical managers" -- any of them that hasn't heard of Linux, that the distros are essentially all the same, and that you can essentially drop-in-replace one for the other as far as your infrastructure is concerned, is lacking more than a few clues. They should hand in their manager cards.

They have *one* job: having this kind of knowledge.

Note that I'm not talking about knowing the technical details here; but a general "what is it and where should I file i

Re: Another distro..

[satanicat]

I think it would be hard to argue what you're saying without taking that unreasonable stance of demanding to know why you hate bananas, when you simply stated you like apples....

But I do feel like the feason most choose CentOS, would make it difficult to replace with say, Ubuntu server.

I know you can probably get the same software to work and work well, even if it requires either tinkering or an intentional setup. I guessI mean the two different distributions are set up quite different.

But back to apples

Re:

[getuid()]

But I do feel like the feason most choose CentOS, would make it difficult to replace with say, Ubuntu server.

Is that so, that "most choose CentOS"?

My guess would be: if you're looking for a corporate linux, you're looking at the "famous" distros, because they have the best bus factor and most "just google it" support: Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE if you're European, Slackware if you're time-traveling from the '90s.

So almost by definition, if it's not Debian or Ubuntu, it's RedHat. If you don't want to pay for it, it's going to be CentOS. If you like Debian, but are afraid of "old n dusty", you take Ubuntu. If you'

Re:

[beheaderaswp]

Yeah, possibly... but not rightfully. Again, switching linux distros is no biggie, but I grant that people have difficulties adapting away from what they've grown into, even if it's just mostly cosmetics.

Cosmetics? If you've never taken a look at performance between Ubuntu Server and CentOS you're wasting 20% of your processors.

I try not to get religious about Linux distros... but there are real differences. To most of the "hobbyist admins" Ubuntu is the latest and greatest. And aside from performance there are many nuanced differences between the various flavors of Linux floating around.

And nuance is often the difference between a network that functions and one that doesn't. Of course some of us have a mor

Re: Another distro..

[getuid()]

Cosmetics? If you've never taken a look at performance between Ubuntu Server and CentOS you're wasting 20% of your processors.

I'm neither an Ubuntu nor a CentOS person, so I don't have any stock here. But... really?!

I'm genuinely surprised about that, do you have any link to back that up? And why? Why should the same code on the same processor with the same kernel run a whooping 20% slower?

Re:

[beheaderaswp]

(Eyes roll into back of head)

Compilers, tool chains, optimization choices, enabled features, modules in kernel, Etc.

Redhat has historically done recursion testing on their distribution and backported fixes rather than running the latest and greatest. This means less software bloat/more optimization- mostly.

Ubuntu is derived from the Debian unstable branch. Make of that what you will. It's like someone forked Fedora and decided to sell support for it. I can't tell you it's a foolish choice- but it's not a fa

Re:

[getuid()]

Compilers, tool chains, optimization choices, enabled features, modules in kernel, Etc.

Err. Sorry, no. Now I know you're talking out of your ass.

None of these will make one distribution 20% slower than the other. Let's take them one by one.

Compiler: Essentially all mainstream distributions use GCC for building packages. The only other F/OSS real competition is clang, but while you can use clang, I really doubt you can use it to compile a whole distribution. I'm expecting there are packages to just refuse to build with it, although I don't know I haven't tried (as opposed to building with GCC)

Re:

[jythie]

And that 'marketing level's importance can not be overstated. Visibility is what determines how easy it is to find help with problems, or how often other people are trying to do the same things as you, and how likely a developer is to test their particular work on a distro. One of the things that made CentOS so major was, well, that it was major, thus people used it, and people ran into problems with it, and posted about those problems, which google could then quickly find... and developers checked to see

I imagine trusting Red Hat will be an issue...

[93 Escort Wagon]

But they are supposed to announce details today (February 1) about a change in their terms of use. If you have 16 or fewer machines, an RHEL subscription will now be free [theregister.com].

Me, I have higher hopes for AlmaLinux [almalinux.org]. The company behind it, CloudLinux, has been maintaining their own debranded version of RHEL for more than a decade.

Re:

[Tukz]

I came to say the same. We run CloudLinux on a few WHM/cPanel installations and CloudLinux was pretty quick to announce they'd release a "free" version, taking over the previous role of CentOS.

Glad to see they gave it an official name now, haven't been in the loop since the announcement. I wasn't too worried, neither cPanel or CloudLinux were just going to sit on their hands after the announcement.

Re:

[Junta]

Even if you are in the clear for RHEL for free, it's a pain.

You have to register your installations with redhat. You have to register for an account, use the account to get the downloads, then again on the installed system use your account to register for updates.

Basically you must let redhat see more about what you are doing and you get into the business of managing your 'entitlement'.

Contrast with CentOS or even Oracle Linux, where you just grabbed the isos from wherever and, by default, it could just go

Centos 8 to Rocky Linux Upgrade Path

[mike2006]

I sure hope they will have an easy path to switch from Centos 8 to Rocky Linux. Some of us already switched to Centos 8 before this and thought we would be good for many years until they pulled the rug out from under us and said end of 2021 your screwed. I notice web hosts have the same dilemma having pulled Centos 8 leaving only old 7 as an option or make the switch to Ubuntu.

They left us hanging without a solution when there was still work to be done. RHEL offered a free version through the developer pro

Re:

[mikechant]

Almalinux beta isos are now available at almalinux.org.

Good at packaging, bad at naming

[pz]

Gregory Kurtzer ... co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh

And apparently neither of them know how to name things. CentOS? That brings a big, Huh what does that even mean, like a cent, it's Penny OS, so it's tiny and cheap? And now, Rocky Linux? Not the sort of thing you should name something meant to be stable and easy to install.

These guys might well have good ideas, but they fall short on marketing skills. Stable Linux. Enterprise Linux. RockOS (if they really want to name it after McGaugh). Something aspirational like EliteOS. Something motivational like Winning Linux. Make allusions to RedHat with Top Hat Linux. Play off the red color with Cardinal Linux (comes with a good mascot, even). Maybe some of those have already been used.

But Rocky Linux? I'm not so tempted to install that one. Might as well try NotFullyDeveloped Linux, BuggyOS, or BadUserExperienceOS instead from the name of it.

(If you don't understand this post as satirical, you need your funny bone checked.)

Re:

[Voyager529]

BorisandNatashaNIX. It installs in YOU.

That's the Russian fork.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

These guys might well have good ideas, but they fall short on marketing skills. Stable Linux. Enterprise Linux. RockOS (if they really want to name it after McGaugh). Something aspirational like EliteOS. Something motivational like Winning Linux. Make allusions to RedHat with Top Hat Linux. Play off the red color with Cardinal Linux (comes with a good mascot, even).

TDNR Linux (This Distro's Not RHEL)

Or to GNU-ify it slightly more

TNR Linux (TNR's Not RHEL)

Re:

[georgewad]

worked pretty well for apache...

Get that shit outta here.

[marcxm]

Fuck no. I despise RHEL and RHEL-like distros. It's all more of a museum, than functional product. Plus - it's still RPM hell and shit on earth. You can eat your god damn RHEL cert. I don't give a single fuck. I am all for knowing everything I CAN about IT and different distros, but RHEL-like distros are such a pain in the royal arsh ... sorry. Bleh. Puke.

Ugh.

[jythie]

Gah, I had not actually heard about CentOS going away. Fantastic... yet more 'take time off from doing actual work to deal with changes that have zero benefit but will probably eat tons of time, not to mention probably killing current functionality because updating it is even more work'.

Red Hat killed CentOS

[AnilJ]

Streaming is bad for even research and university research computers. RH wants money from the universities I guess.

Prematurely Defunct?

[fredness]

"... of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution" lead in seems to me an overly salacious remark. Clickbait for sure. Its absurd how long it takes for good stable bits to make it into RedHat. CentOS has been quite successful and is being repositioned to instead of lagging behind RedHat to be the post Fedora precursor to RedHat.

this CERN move did not age well

[Kvasio]

https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]