CentOS Successor Rocky Linux Gets $26M to Fund Push Into Enterprise Space (zdnet.com) 27
"CIQ has landed $26 million in funding to support its plans to expand the use of Rocky Linux in the enterprise space," reports ZDNet.
Last year, Red Hat decided to stop supporting CentOS 8 and shifted focus to CentOS Stream. CentOS had some huge enterprise users, among them Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon. In response, Greg Kurtzer, one of CentOS's founders, kicked off Rocky Linux in December 2020.... Kurtzer says Rocky Linux adoption has been "massive", with monthly downloads of OS images typically 250,000, reaching 750,000 in a bumper month. "Within two months we had 10,000 developer and contributors trying to be part of this project...."
The project has gained the support of Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the main-line stable Linux kernel, to meet community demands for Rocky Linux to run on a more modern, optimized kernel, Kurtzer said. Kroah-Hartman is leading Rocky Linux special interest group (SIG) for the kernel to create an optional enhanced kernel for Rocky Linux. "He's working closely with us to make sure the kernel we use is blessed by him. He's in the loop as bugs come up and help us manage that kernel in Rocky Linux," says Kurtzer.
"Moreover, today's news follows shortly after CIQ inked a major deal with Google to help support companies looking to deploy Rocky Linux on Google's cloud infrastructure," reports VentureBeat.
Kurtzer tells the site that Rocky Linux "has been a rocket ship in terms of uptake across the enterprise and cloud."
The project has gained the support of Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the main-line stable Linux kernel, to meet community demands for Rocky Linux to run on a more modern, optimized kernel, Kurtzer said. Kroah-Hartman is leading Rocky Linux special interest group (SIG) for the kernel to create an optional enhanced kernel for Rocky Linux. "He's working closely with us to make sure the kernel we use is blessed by him. He's in the loop as bugs come up and help us manage that kernel in Rocky Linux," says Kurtzer.
"Moreover, today's news follows shortly after CIQ inked a major deal with Google to help support companies looking to deploy Rocky Linux on Google's cloud infrastructure," reports VentureBeat.
Kurtzer tells the site that Rocky Linux "has been a rocket ship in terms of uptake across the enterprise and cloud."
Wake me when they get btrfs back... (Score:1)
Wake me when they get btrfs back, like they have as a default filesystem in Fedora. One of the reasons RH pulled btrfs is that they have Stratis which is supposed to do a lot of magic stuff... but I've yet to hear about that actually implemented other than tests. SLES is on btrfs, Ubuntu has it as an option. It would be nice to see a real filesystem. Facebook didn't throw millions of dollars in bug fixes at btrfs for nothing.
We went with Alma rather than Rocky (Score:3)
Regardless of which clone people went with - it's good to see how people stepped up to fill this CentOS-shaped void.
And while the corporations involved are certainly acting in their own perceived best self-interest, we should acknowledge their contributions as well. They've certainly been instrumental in getting this moving so quickly.
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We went with Alma as well.
CentOS was created by Gregory Kurtzer. We all invested in CentOS. Kurtzer then cashed in by selling to Red Hat, which got us into a lot of trouble. I'm not investing in Rocky Linux, with the risk of Kurtzer screwing us again.
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I have no ill-feelings about this "Cash In" and RHEL did make promises. So to me, good for Kurtzer. At least he decided to bring something back to the community after the CentOS change
Me, I would still be here (Office Space):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGexOBwdeHQ
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As far as I know, he and CentOS parted ways well before Red Hat acquired. He basically got scared off by the RedHat legal team, when RedHat was going for the stick before ultimately bringing the carrot instead.
However, I've been seeing Alma as executing better so far, and haven't seen the angle where Rocky makes sense apart from sentimentality over his CentOS history 17 years ago and his close relations with the US department of energy.
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Founders left long time ago.
2003-2008 was the classic era of CentOS: McGaugh, Kurtzer, Davis.
In 2008 the last founder, Davis left CentOS. Financial troubles in 2009, an open letter. RedHat started to contract contributors.
2014 was a formality, the end of acquisition.
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So did we and the simple reason which is playing out right now is "delay to patch release". So 8.6 comes out and Alma has a release within ~2 days last week. Rocky and as I type good luck with that you are still on 8.5 five days later and minus some security fixes. So far Rocky has been better than CentOS, but Alma is better still.
Frankly picking the provably less secure option is extremely unprofessional. There are justifiable arguments for not picking Oracle; it's Oracle and they have a habit of screwing
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Nah, while the Red Hat family of Linux has been going downhill, doesn't mean other distros have a problem.
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RHEL started to go downhill earlier than that. RHEL7 had too many point updates that broke compatibility with stuff. Kernel APIs for IPv6 and various filsystem stuff, and the entire Inifinband/RDMA stack, got changed on point updates. Not just breaking binary compatibility, but breaking source code compatibility. I got hit by all three of these. They probably broke even more things that I wasn't directly affected by. Red Hat have forgotten what "stable" means.
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Funny enough, binary compatibility has been broken less often than source code compatibility. Oddly they frequently managed compatible binary signatures for interfaces, but the headers tweaked by backports enough to break compilation.
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> They probably broke even more things that I wasn't directly affected by.
They broke the most standard BIND deployment configuration during 7 (not even a point release) and IIRC sat on a community patch for two years. Everybody who broke had to find the bug and hand-deploy the fix.
I bailed all of my machines for Debian. In retrospect I should have done it a year sooner. Stretch was better than CentOS. Jessie, probably not.
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The aberration was the five years for RHEL8 to come out after RHEL7. Prior to that is ~3 years between release from at least 3 through to 7. RHEL9 is back to the ~3 year cycle. There is no "acceleration" as you put it but a return to the norm.
That you can write a whole diatribe ignorant of this shows that you know jack about what happened. I won't get into RHEL5 being unusable till 5.2, and not really production ready to 5.4
Interestingly if you have IBM Spectrum Protect Plus licenses the snap servers are ZF
Re:Stupid name for a distro... (Score:5, Funny)
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The problem is, not all enterprises are for profit corporations. Laboratories, schools and non-profits never really used RedHat, they usually used something like CentOS or Scientific Linux, etc. Now that those distros are defunct, those institutions have been left high and dry. Believe me, there are plenty of enterprises that will be more than happy to run a Rocky linux!
I would love to see IBM's internal discussions (Score:2)
about this. Somehow, I doubt that killing CentOS made them the money they thought they'd make off of refugees.
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Even though they offer free subscriptions for developers, it's still a pain to work with RedHat. I can't imagine that many will migrate to RedHat, instead almost all will take the much easier route to migrate to Rocky.
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Yup. You have to jump through a lot of hoops - and keep jumping through them, over and over again - if you want the free RHEL. Plus that 16-box limit for the free RHEL can be kind of a problem, even if you're not a large shop.
We're a University department - we're not using Linux to make money. We have a handful of Linux servers - well under the limit of 16 IBM set. But we also have several dozen workstations running Linux in various student labs. If we're going to have to use something else for those labs a
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It's the worst part of enterprise software, that the user is made to do extra work to prove to the vendor they are abiding by the terms. The actual license cost is frequently low compared to the labor cost associated with proving your entitlement on an ongoing basis.
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Once upon a time, we subscribed to Red Hat proper. More than once, the license / subscription manager screwed up and apparently decided we were running an unlicensed install - which (IIRC) prevented us from updating until we sorted out the subscription issue, among other issues.
Things are messed up when it's actually easier to use the free clone than it is to pay for and run the original.
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> about this. Somehow, I doubt that killing CentOS made them the money they thought they'd make off of refugees.
As silly as it is, a place like Disney will never run Redhat. The MAGA association is just too much to explain all the way up the corporate ladder.
IBM should rebrand it to IBM Enterprise Linux or IBM Global Linux. You wouldn't believe how many middle managers would insist on it if they knew they had IBM to blame for any problems.