Last year, red hat decided to stop supporting CentOS 8 and shift its focus to CentOS stream. However, CentOS still has some large enterprise customers, including Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon In view of this, Greg kurtzer, one of the founders of CentOS, launched the rocky Linux project in December 2020 and released the first stable version of rocky Linux 8.4 seven months later
The latest news is that, as the founding sponsor and service partner of rocky Linux, after raising $33 million and working with Google cloud to provide customers with rocky Linux support, kurtzer's CIQ company received another round of $26 million a financing led by two bear capital.
Kurtzer said: Rocky Linux has been adopted on a "large scale", and the monthly download volume of OS image has reached about 250000 in the off-season and even 750000 in the peak period. Even better, even as a young project, rocky Linux attracted tens of thousands of developers and contributors in two months.
It is reported that before the release of rocky Linux, CIQ was developing a new platform for enterprise high-performance computing, HPC center, cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.
However, in the process, red hat terminated CentOS support - even in the past decade, it has been one of the preferred operating systems for many enterprise, cloud, virtual machine and container applications.
Then when red hat put an end to CentOS, we felt that our background was more conducive to regain the right thing.
In addition, kurtzer believes that open source license will be a key differentiation factor in the field of enterprise software: "We support open source very much. As for all content published by ourselves, we usually prefer MIT and BSD licenses".
Even many other companies see open source as a marketing gimmick to achieve higher adoption. But they often firmly control the project and its development direction, and even take the project as a hostage to some extent.
However, a real open source community should not be controlled by a company, which is also our firm belief. If an organization wants to open source a specific piece of software, they must accept that competitors or another enterprise will eventually achieve greater success or revenue.
Only in this way can open source projects play its greatest significance. If your organization is not ready, please keep the source closed first.
Finally, the next big move of rocky Linux is to build a system called Peridot to ensure that rocky Linux can catch up with the modern Linux kernel.
Interestingly, kurtzer added: most rocky Linux contributors prefer to use the golang language created by Google to build the operating system.
The project is supported by Greg kroah Hartman, a mainline stable Linux kernel maintainer, to meet the community's needs for rocky Linux to run on a more modern and optimized kernel.
Meanwhile, kroah Hartman is leading the rocky Linux kernel special interest group (SIG) and is committed to building an optional enhanced kernel for rocky Linux.