The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The rise of Rocky Linux (Interview)

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

This week we're talking with Gregory Kurtzer about Rocky Linux. Greg is the founder of the CentOS project, which recently shifted its strategy and has the Linux community scrambling. Rocky Linux aims to continue where the CentOS project left off — to provide a free and open source community-driven enterprise grade Linux operating system. We discuss the history of the CentOS project, how it fell under Red Hat's control, the recent shift in Red Hat's strategy with CentOS, and how Rocky Linux is designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This week on The ChangeLog, we're talking about Rocky Linux. We're talking to Gregory Kurtzer. Greg is the founder of the CentOS Project, which recently shifted its strategy and has the Linux community scrambling. Rocky Linux aims to continue where the CentOS Project left off, to provide a free and open-source community-driven, enterprise-grade Linux operating system. We'll discuss the history of the CentOS Project,

how it fell under Red Hat's control, this recent shift in Red Hat's strategy with CentOS, and how Rocky Linux is being designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible Thank you. for changelog is provided by Fastly. You can learn more at fastly.com and our feature flags are powered by LaunchDarkly. Check them out at launchdarkly.com This year we simplified and improved changelog's infra by replacing Docker Swarm and Terraform with Linux Kubernetes Engine LKE. Not only is this new setup more cohesive

but deploys are 20% faster, which is awesome. Changelog.com is more resilient with a mean time recovery of just under eight minutes. And interacting with the entire setup is done with a single pane of glass via K9S. Linode is our cloud of choice. We trust them. They keep it fast. They keep it simple. And the best part, you can get started on Leno today with $100 in free credit. Get all the details at leno.com slash changelog or text changelog to 474747 and get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Again, leno.com slash changelog. so we're here with greg kurtzer who's founder of centos project here to talk about rocky linux if you recognize greg's voice it's because he's been on the changelog previously talking about singularity which was an awesome conversation as well we'll link that one up so folks can go back

and listen to more of greg's voice but we're here to talk about Rocky and we can't really talk about that without talking about CentOS first and there's a long history there. So first of all, thanks for coming back on the show. Hi guys. It's great to be here. Thank you. Good to have you back, Greg. Absolutely. Can you just tell us the CentOS story? That's probably a big one. Whittle it down for us. CentOS story. That's probably a big one. You know, whittle it down for us. Oh my goodness. Just open that up for us. Okay, well, let's see. Started back in, I'd say about 2003-ish, 2004-ish.

We were starting a community managed RPM based distribution of linux i ended up landing the lead on that project simply because i saw that there was an opportunity to create a community managed rpm based distribution of linux wow that's a lot of that's a lot to spit out all at once manage rpm based distribution of linux now i read that you were in a debian before that what and certainly d package had some sort of inspiration like why doesn't rpm have this kind of a situation why switch over from why not just be like all about debian why why do a new one well it had to do with my employer at the time so uh when i got into debian it was um pre-2000 i had an employer linux care at the time and i worked with a lot of other linux really great people in the within

the linux community and the prominent distribution that everybody was using then was Debian. And so I picked up Debian, fell in love with Debian. I thought Debian was awesome. I love the community behind it. I love the packaging system. But most importantly, well, maybe not most importantly, but a big piece of that was Apt. And being able to run, you know, Apt get and install pretty much any application that exists, I thought was really fantastic. And when I changed jobs, I moved over to Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the Department of Energy. And LBL was standardized on Red Hat or rather RPM-based distributions of Linux. And all of their infrastructure at that point and knowledge was kind of core and central to RPM. And as a result of that,

that was what was being used pervasively and that was their standard. So when I came on, I basically had to pick up Red Hat. Now that was not my first time using it. At Linux Care and previous, I definitely used Red Hat a reasonable amount, but I absolutely missed apt-get. And so I started a project

actually called grab, G-R-A-B, grab, to install RPMs and do dependency resolution and version updates and whatnot in a very apt, similar way. And that actually led me to the introduction of Seth Vidal, who ended up writing Yum. And so Seth and I were talking at some point kind of early on. We ended up having like a little RPM group in Freenode. And we started talking about what is the need out there and the fact that there is a need for a community-managed RPM-based distribution of Linux. Because at that time, there was Red Hat,

there was Mandrake, there was a few others. Caldera was just still around back then, and Coral Linux and whatnot. Although I don't remember if Coral Linux was RPM. But there was a bunch of RPM-based distributions, but nothing community-managed. And that was kind of the twist that started the Chaos Linux Foundation, which was a goal of creating a community RPM distribution of Linux. And that kind of took off. It really started building up some steam and whatnot. And some of that into that Red Hat Linux, which was the predecessor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ended up being end of life by Red Hat. And so I always get the versions confused at this point. I think it was Red Hat Linux 8 or Red Hat

Linux 9, and it all of a sudden just kind of disappeared. And everything that everybody was counting on at that point just vanished. So the outcome of that was, well, we were still using that as a build system for Chaos Linux. We were using that to bootstrap the Chaos Linux-based system. And so we needed a bootstrap. We needed something to basically leverage to build that core operating system. And one of the guys on the team, whose name was Rocky, said, well, I think it'd be possible, and I have some experience with actually rebuilding Red Hat Linux. So how about I just throw the RHEL sources, or the new RHEL,

Red Hat moved Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. How about I just take those RHEL sources and just throw this at my builder and just see what we get, and let's start there. He was able to do that in relatively short order, and the next thing we knew, we basically had a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And when we released it, that just seemed to take over. Chaos Linux and whatnot was just basically dwarfed by the growth of CentOS. And Chaos Linux basically kind of slowly dwindled out as less and less people were interested in that as more and more people were using centos and that's kind of the the origins of centos gotcha so since i'm a pedant and i'm hearing you say centos and i'm hearing i

said centos and now i'm feeling like a uninformed pedant i wanted to say centos is this a controversy i did read about it on your forums at one point, people discussing, these are all generally okay terms, but you call it CentOS. I do, yeah. But, you know. Are you going to like off with my head if I call it CentOS? There was a while where that bugged me, but yeah, it doesn't anymore. I've matured. I've grown up.

Well, I have a principle of adopting the pronunciation of the guest on the show, so I will do my best to call it Centos. Until you're gone, then I'll go right back to my old ways. Of course. What is the thing behind that? What makes you say Centos versus Centos or Centos? How did you come to Centos? Like Mentos.

How do you rationalize that's right? Aside from that you made it up, of course. So I didn't actually make it up. So there was a person on the team. So we were actually stuck with names. And I tend to go back and forth where I'm never happy with a name. Although Rocky Linux, I'm absolutely happy with, which is really ironic considering nobody else was for a while.

That's super cool. Oh, we still have people coming into our Slack and coming into discussion saying, can we please change the name? It's like, no, we're not going to change the name. Only one pronunciation is a winner for me. Yeah. But we started off calling CentOS Chaos EL,

obviously EL for Enterprise Linux. But we knew that that was just a temporary placeholder. One of the contributors and a person who ended up kind of taking the project is he basically decided that or proposed, excuse me, proposed the name Centos. And I said, you know, I really like it, but what I don't like is the scent and the OS, because it makes it sound like by kind of saying OS, it kind of puts cent out there. It implies it costs money.

It implies it's not free. I know cent is cheap. I get it. Right. But it's an infinite increase from zero. So it just kind of bugged me at the time. So I was saying, no, it's a free operating system. It's not a cent.

And so that was really my take of it. But I said, as long as we kind of string the whole thing together, and as community enterprise OS is one kind of big acronym, kind of an acronym, right? Just call it CentOS. To me, that just sounded better. It made more sense. And I said, so as long as we do that, I'd be happy with it. Now, of course, that's not what ended up happening. And I just kind of bit my tongue for a while. But that was the foundation of the name Centos. It'd be a little easier if the O and the S wasn't capitalized. Yeah, it would be. Yeah, if the O and the S was not capitalized, it'd be a lot easier just to combine the words and it'd be Bcentos. But then I guess it wouldn't be considered an operating system. So we're back to square one here. And for many, many years, and I actually, I'm guilty of this. I do it both ways. Sometimes I'll go, you know, CentOS is one word, no camel case. And then other times I'll actually

capitalize the OS. Yeah. At this point, I'm just, you know, whatever's easy. I'm not thinking, I'm not really, I'm not pedic about that anymore. I don't know. I grew up, got old, and yeah. There's only so much. You've got to pick your battles in life, you know? And generally speaking, unless it's like a travesty of a pronunciation, I think. We get that a lot here, though, too. We get change and then log.

We get change, capital L-O-G. Two words, one word. We get all caps, change log, and we're... It sort of irks me, but I'm kind of like you. I've just sort of moved on and just don't correct anybody. But we obviously, when writing it, write it the way we want it written. And that's the control measure we... Capital C, lowercase L, all one word.

There you go. Set the record straight. That's change log. But you know, this happened with Linux, too, right? I mean, when Linux, you know, back in the 90s, it was Linux, it was Linux, it was... I mean, it was... And I remember that there was an audio,

a WAV file that you can still find on the internet, probably even today, of Torvalds saying, you know, hi, I am Linus Torvalds. I pronounce Linux, Linux. Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux Linux. Hello, this is Linus Storvalds and I pronounce Linux as Linux. That's the whole WAV file. Just to kind of set the record straight.

Set the record straight. Nowadays, I think everybody knows, I think that it's just Linux. But yeah, I don't think anyone cares anymore if you call it Linux. I don't know. I'm glad that worked for him. You know, the gif slash

gif guy didn't work out so well because he came out and he's like it's pronounced gif and we're all like no it isn't man sorry no you're wrong the creator of the name is sorry it's not a graphical interface format you just don't get your way you know exactly that's what gets his way all right so now that we've taken that fun tangent, it's always fun on podcasts to talk pronunciations because we have to actually pronounce for the first time. I can type it out the same way as you. In our own minds, we just pronounce it.

But we're speaking out loud, and we have to say these things. So I will take back my CentOS, and I'll stick with CentOS. You said it kind of took off. That's kind of where we left off. All of a sudden, it became really the community edition, right? Like everybody seemed to adopt CentOS who was in the Red Hat area. Is that fair to say? The community folks.

Yeah, I remember being, so it's a fun process when you come up with a project and, you know, so a couple of my other projects, this is a little known fact that I'll share just for our very small community of friends here that I tend to come up with these ideas usually in situations where they're not quite so, I'll just say it, you know, like these ideas will just come up in the shower sometimes, right? And what's really funny is later starting to see resumes coming in, starting to see job descriptions coming in that actually have, and you start seeing that name, that idea that you came up with. And all of a sudden you start seeing it kind of coming into reality. So the first time I heard somebody else mention Santos outside of, by the way, now you guys are getting me on the name.

Now I'm like, what am I saying after I say it? Thinking about it. Yeah. No, I'm thinking about it. Is it right or not? The first time I heard somebody say that I was at supercomputing in Phoenix, Arizona. And I don't remember even which supercomputing was 2004, 2005. I don't remember. And I was talking with a vendor and another guy comes up and interrupts us and says, are you going to have support for CentOS? I was like, what?

So at that point, I never heard anyone even say it out loud aside from like my circles. It was still kind of very early on. So that was like the first clue that this is actually kind of really getting, starting to get big. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger from there. We had a donations button and within, you know, the, the few months of it being kind of an active project and us releasing, you know, we actually had thousands of dollars coming in per month on the donation button and the trajectory, the increase of that was just, I mean, it was remarkable to watch this just kind of blow up and just get so much

visibility. And then just to see how well it situated itself within the enterprise ecosystem and cloud ecosystem later. It's just been a remarkable thing to just watch, even if, you know, even after I was no longer associated with the project, just to see how it matured and how it developed was always, you know, it's a very, you know, it's a proud moment for me. Pretty cool that I can grow up so much that the found one of the founders and the creators does not have to maintain it does not have to be associated. you know so much so much so many of us get stuck in that that infinite loop of maintenance right like i yeah the burden and sometimes it's because the project hasn't matured enough to a place or the person who created it either by you know lack of

knowledge of how to do it or sometimes it's uh itoriented. For whatever reason, they still are the project. And so a lot of projects start and stay there. The fact that it grew so big, how long did you work on it and then how long were you away from it as it's kind of had its own life over the years? I was associated with it until Red Hat sued me. And at that point, it's a good reason to disassociate. We're laughing. I'm sure this is terrible for you. Now, all of a sudden we've just involved lawyers, so I need to be more pedantic.

Okay. It wasn't a lawsuit. It was a threaten of a lawsuit, which was enough in my book to, uh, to do it. So they wrote you a firmly written letter from a lawsuit, which was enough in my book to do it. So they wrote you a firmly written letter from a lawyer, right? There was several of them, yes. And I ended up disassociating myself from the project because I didn't see a clear way for me to protect myself with where the project was going and how it was maturing. So plus, the project was already and how it was maturing. So plus, you know, the project was already kind of growing. It was taking a life of itself, you know, not to sound weird, but it didn't need me anymore. What was their beef? The beef was that on our website, we had the name Red Hat Linux or

Red Hat quite a bit on the website. And they weren't giving us a hard time about rebuilding. They weren't giving us a hard time about even trademarks within the operating system. But they said the fact that people are doing internet searches, people are doing Google searches for Red Hat and CentOS is coming up first was giving them heartache. And they said, right now, if you do a search for Red Hat, you get centos.org before you get Red Hat. And that was their beef. They said, please remove the Red Hat trademark from the websites.

And that was it. The problem was, is that the people that they contacted on the Centos team decided that they didn't feel as uh, on the CentOS team decided that they didn't feel as though that was a reasonable request. And they decided to push back by not removing the branding and ignoring Red Hat. So what happened from there is, um, Red Hat got irate to the point where they sent threatening letters to them. They didn't care. A couple of them not in the United States.

So they really felt like they were beyond Red Hat's reach. And then they finally got to the point where they just sent me a threatening email of, actually a threatening phone call first of a lawsuit. And I basically, first cease and desist and then lawsuit if I don't, if I don't respond accordingly. And I was like, stop, I don't know nothing about this. Let's back up. What's going on? What do we need to do? And their response was, um, you know, we need you to remove the trademarks from your website. I'm like, okay, no problem. We'll get it done. And I kind of, I said, give me a week. It'll all be removed. And I went back to the web team for, on behalf of Centos. And they said,

well, we can't do this until another person also approves. And I said, no, you have to make that. And that person was unavailable. And I said, you have to do this now. We don't have time. We're not screwing around on this. Remove Red Hat's trademarks. And they complied. But they did it in a way that basically kind of jabbed Red Hat. They basically posted the legal notices that they were given to the blog, to the mailing list, and um, and basically renamed everything, uh, something called Penalov standard for prominent North American Linux vendor and kind of mocked the whole thing that got slash dotted, got a huge, this is back when slash dot was like, you know,

everybody was using slash dot big driver slash dot. Yeah, exactly. This got slash dotted and a huge amount of attention was brought to CentOS as a result of this. And I literally was coming up the stairwell at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in building 50, back where Cliff Stoll, I don't know if you ever followed the cuckoo's egg, but Cliff Stoll was working there. Anyway, coming up the same stairwell and I get into my office, my phone's ringing, I pick it up, it's Red Hat Legals calling me on my office phone at Berkeley Lab saying, I thought we had this covered. I thought we had a deal. Why the hell do you do this? This made us look really, really bad. I said, stop. Again, you have to tell me what just happened

because I'm unaware. I just sat down in my office. What's going on? And they to tell me what just happened. Uh, cause I'm, I'm unaware. I just sat down in my office. What's going on. And they shared with me what, you know, what happened. And I said, and they said, look for this, we're actually coming after you now. And I basically said, well, I, it would be pointless. I'm going to disassociate myself from the project at this point. Here are the people who are responsible for doing that. Please don't sue me. And that was the gist of it. And that was why we ended up going into a different direction. It must have been pretty sad for you, though, to have to be so foundational to the project, so involved, I mean, to the name.

You know what I mean? Like, you're part of the ability to call it CentOS versus CentOS or CentOS or whatever you want to call it. Like you're a foundational person to have to leave onto those terms. I was happy not to be sued. Of course, of course. But you were left with no choice though. It was like, here's the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know what? I mean, these things happen. Yeah. Yeah, it was upsetting, but you know these things happen. Yeah. Yeah, it was upsetting, but, you know, things happen. And the CentOS team had some problems later on with some of those people who actually did that. As you can see, there was an open letter to CentOS. I don't know if you guys have seen this, where the developers of it were unable to reach the person who owned the domain, the person who owned the donation buttons and was receiving all of the donations and all of this. And they, so they posted actually an open letter to this person because they wouldn't, he wouldn't respond. And they, it, it was a little bit difficult for them,

but they were finally able to get a hold of the project again. And, and CentOS has definitely had some ups and downs. I mean, it has not been, you know, a very stable project and there's a lot of reasons for that, but it's definitely, you know, it's had some ups and downs. I mean, it has not been, you know, a very stable project. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But it's definitely, you know, it's had some ups and downs. And since Red Hat has taken over for it, I mean, for the most part, it's actually it's become much more stable. It's become much more, you know, reasonable in terms of how the project has been managed and whatnot. And I don't mean to say that it wasn't managed very well by the team, but it's definitely had its share of drama over the years. This can also be attributed, I would say, at least by assumption that our ability to open source well, meaning organizationally, foundationally, you know, in all the ways

has matured over the years. And this may have been, as you mentioned, back in 2004, like we've learned a lot, you know, the, the mindset, the, the morals of open source have always been there, but how to do it has been a variance, you know, it's been variable over the years. I think I would assume that's attributable attributed to the fact that it's just how to open sources matured. And that might be a side effect of this ups and downs is just, we've learned and you were learning as an organization. Yeah, that's a very fair statement. When I first started doing this, you know, managing a small open source project is not

a big deal. But as soon as you start getting a lot of attention, a lot of contributors, it becomes a management problem. It becomes setting expectations, coordination, and really just kind of keeping people involved. And, you know, and you have to manage a very, you know, you have to manage it very inclusively. Right. So how to do that is actually a difficult problem. The way that I did it with CentOS was a struggle. I didn't have the experience. I was still very young and trying to figure out

what best to do. And there were people there that had a more aggressive stance than I did. And they were able to manipulate the project a little bit and take it over, which is what we saw happen. At this point, I have a much larger amount of experience, both in terms of what to do as well as what not to do. And I do feel as though that Rocky is now getting the benefit of that experience. And I'm very excited to be able to demonstrate how I believe that an open source project should be run, how it should be maintained, and how we can take precautions to make sure that it is not only inclusively managed, it is not only stable, but it also has the appropriate community promises necessary to ensure that things like what happened with Santos would not happen again. There's a certain amount of core fundamental

leadership that needs to be put into place, everything from charters to documentation to transparency, that just absolutely needs to occur for a big open source project to survive. Failing that, you're going to end up with, there's going to be politics, there's going to be counter agendas, and there's going to be no way to really hold people accountable for doing particular things. So you have to be very transparent and very upfront about that. And that's what we're doing with Rocky. Right now, not all of the decisions are being, they're not completely, you know, right up in everybody's face, but what we're doing is we're documenting exactly what decisions are being made publicly, what decisions are being made privately, how are we managing security of information, security of data. So for example, here's a really

big one. CentOS always had kind of a fundamental problem of trust because every time you build a package for the operating system, that package has to be cryptographically signed. To sign that package means you have to have the private keys and the passphrase necessary to decrypt that private key so you can use it to sign your package. Well, let's go back like 15 years ago. How do you do that, right, in a scalable way with people that you've never met, people that you have no contract with. And how do you trust that? So the way to do that is, well, you keep your group very small, very tight knit, and you manage it very, very carefully who has access to what. So that was kind of the initial culture of CentOS was about that very small unit of trust. Moving forward now, well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to replicate that.

What we want to do is we want to engage a very large percentage of the community, people that want to come, people that want to help and be part of this. But that doesn't, and this is by no means a slight to anybody, but that is by no means, does that mean we're going to trust everyone equally, right? You can't because you haven't built that relationship yet, but we still want to allow people to contribute. So Fedora has done a really good job at solving this problem. And this is something we're trying to replicate now and trying to build off and leverage a lot of that existing work, a lot of that existing code and infrastructure. So instead of just jumping right in and just start building packages,

which believe me, we could do, instead of doing that, we're spending a lot of time defining the infrastructure, defining the processes, doing the documentation necessary to ensure that what we're building is going to be A, repeatable, B, scalable, and we're going to be able to allow more people to be part of this project in such a way that does not sacrifice the trust or integrity of some of the private material. And we're going for various security certifications. FIPS is a goal. We're really trying to hit a FIPS certification. This is not my area of expertise at all, but I've been contacted by a lot of organizations that have basically offered to help us do this, help us achieve this level of certification. But to do that, that means that the entire infrastructure has to be approved. We have to build the entire infrastructure from ground up, kind of designed to be able to meet these standards to ensure that what comes out of it, the product that comes out of this, can be absolutely trusted. And it gets really difficult when you start thinking about how do you do that when you have n number of people in the community committing code. So that's the big kind of piece of what we're trying to solve right now.

Again, we could have just run and started building packages. We could have. The packages were available. Source RPMs are available. We could have just done that. But the goal here was to create something that is better than what we've done before. And to build a community that's going to be stronger and be more resilient to any sort of, I'm going to use this word with air quotes around it, hostile takeovers. We're going to try to keep and we're do everything we can to keep Rocky exactly as it exists today and exactly what CentOS started off trying to be, which is a community enterprise operating system. This episode is brought to you by LaunchDarkly, feature management for the modern enterprise, power experimentation in production.

Here's how it works. LaunchDarkly enables development and operation teams to deploy code at any time. Even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users, wrapping code with feature flags gives you the safety to test new features and infrastructure in your production environments without impacting the wrong end users. When you're ready to release, more widely simply update the feature flag and the changes are made instantaneously by the real-time streaming architecture. Eliminate risk, deliver value. Get started for free today at LaunchDarkly.com. Again, LaunchDarkly.com. So what was the triggering event that made you spring back into action? Because you've been disassociated from the CentOS project for a while. Here you are talking about Rocky Linux and it's a new thing, but kind

of an old thing, but still a new thing. What happened? Why Rocky Linux? So that's a good question. I have a company and in this company, we are building, you know, various high performance computing stacks and enterprise computing stacks and whatnot, not to make this a plug for my company, but we needed CentOS. We have a lot of users, a lot of customers and people in the community from my other open source projects as well. Everybody's using CentOS. So when I got word that there was something happening, and I had a little bit of visibility, but not a huge amount, but I had a little bit of visibility that there's going to be some changes. You know, when RHEL 8 was, or CentOS 8 was first released, you know, we kind of got wind that there was going to be some changes coming. And I didn't know really what those changes were going to be. I didn't know when those changes

were going to happen. But of course, it started some discussions within my own organization on what are we going to do? What are we going to recommend for our customers to do if something really changes that's big? And not to mention all the open source users of our other software that's leveraging it. So we came to the conclusion, actually, and Robert, one of my partners with my company, said to me, he goes, you know, I predict you're going to build another operating system here within the next two years. And he said that, started telling me that actually a while ago, but he didn't expect it to happen soon, like this soon. And then all of a sudden, we see that there was an announcement on the CentOS blog that they're changing the direction of CentOS.

And I used it as an opportunity to basically just say, well, let me see if anyone else is interested in doing this because we've been thinking about this and we need something stable. Well, I'm not sure that CentOS is going to meet those needs anymore. So let me just mention something on the CentOS blog as a comment. The next thing I know, and I reference everyone in that blog post to point to come to this particular Slack that I run called HPCNG. And I said, you know, just come over here and we'll talk about it if anyone's interested in talking about this. The next thing I know is the amount of people joining this Slack just took off. At first it was like, you know, it was tens of people.

And then it was hundreds of people. And then it just kept off. At first it was like, you know, it was tens of people and then it was hundreds of people. And then it just kept climbing. Now the HBCNG Slack started off, you know, before all this occurred at about 1200, 1300 people were in there. We are now just teetering on 10,000 and it's been barely a month. So you can see how fast that this has been just taking off. And what happened next was actually pretty incredible. It literally went from nothing, it was just an idea, to I literally had hundreds of people direct messaging me simultaneously, asking, how can they help? They want to be part of this. And I said, well, let's start discussing what this would look like. So quickly created a channel, redirected people to this channel. That channel grew so fast that it wasn't long before I couldn't keep up with the threads in the channel. So just like an IRC, if you've got a big channel and a lot of people trying to talk, it scrolls faster than you can respond to somebody's answer. And threading, I mean, you end up with so many side channel discussions in threading

that it's hard to keep track of that as well. So immediately we started creating more channels to try to group interests together. So people that were interested in development, people that are interested in community, people that are interested in community, people that are interested in website, people that are interested in organization. We created all these different channels. And then we created more channels within development because we have people doing the installer, people doing packaging, people doing the auto build infrastructure, people doing source code management. And then we had all the infrastructure teams, people that are starting to talk about things like, where are we going to host this? How are we going to build this?

How are we going to create all of this in such a way that it can be leveraged at large scale? Then we had the security team that started developing. And you could see. And this was all in the first three days. So we had people that already had installers built in the first few days. So we had people that already had installers built in the first few days. And with their versions of the Rocky Linux logo and whatnot, I mean, it took us more than three days to make the logo. But we had people doing, you know, that were focused predominantly on, you know, branding now and creating logos. And I'm now looking at this going, I've never in all of my open source career seen a community

grow and evolve like I just witnessed. I don't even know of this happening. The closest thing that I've heard of something like this happening is when Oracle took over MySQL and Maria was born. That is about the closest to this, but everybody who was in that community and came over to us basically said, no, no, no, this blew that away. And I'm sitting now looking at all this, thinking to myself, oh my gosh, how am I going to manage this? How am I going to coordinate this in a way that's going to keep everybody engaged, everybody in the loop, but organize all of this. It's like trying to sip water through a fire hose on full blast. And it's just, there's so much coming at me. It was actually difficult. It took me about an hour to go from one side of my Slack and just scroll down and get to all the comments and all the

questions and then just to go back to the top again. So it was like nothing I've experienced in terms of a community growing overnight. So what this told me, wait a sec, there's a big need. There's a lot of people that not only need this, but want to actually do this. I said, okay, well, the question in my head is, is this something that people are interested in doing has been answered? The answer is yes. There's a lot of people interested in doing this. And there's a lot of people that, there's a whole new generation of people since I've been involved in doing something like this that actually really want to be part of the distribution. And I'm hearing people on the Red Hat side saying CentOS was always kind of a drain of Red Hat putting in money into it, and they're not really getting anything out of it, which is a completely

fair point from a business perspective. But at the same token, there are thousands of people that are all asking and trying to help and be part of this. So when I look at why is CentOS, why did it never really flourish like this? The answer that comes to me really just has to do with the fact that right from that very beginning that I mentioned earlier, that culture of that small kind of core team really was a, while it was a requirement back then, because we didn't have an infrastructure or a method to deal with that back then, we do now. And now we can handle this very differently through CICD, through auto builders like Koji, and what Fedora has been been working on, which is Koji and several other pieces. There's there's a whole new opportunity now than existed 15 plus years ago with CentOS.

And it is an opportunity to build up a community of people that are not only interested in the core operating system, but interested in areas around the core operating system. So for example, within the first week, there was about three or four different SIG proposals, special interest group proposals that came through. One on security, one on a desktop and laptop version, one on storage, and one on high performance computing. Obviously, I probably am somewhat to blame for that one. But all of these kind of special interest groups. And it's flourished since then. We now have even more people that are interested in doing special interest groups. So we now have to balance,

okay, we've got this core operating system, which has to absolutely be as stable as possible and track RHEL as closely as possible. We jokingly call it a bug-for-bug level of compatibility. I like that. I read that. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And then have the ability to have additional features and capabilities via special interest groups that we can maybe toggle on or off for each install. So somebody can choose to use either, let's say a, oh, another interest, special interest group that I forgot about is the

absolute lightweight minimal system. You know, people want to strip everything out and just have an absolute tiny little thin core operating system that they can leverage for either containers or for very minimal installs or to run Kubernetes on top of and just have that sitting just right above the bare metal. So there's all these different special interest groups, but what if we can now make tune the installer or special installer, not the standard one, but the special installer to just do a minimal operating system, just do that minimal install. And I know a lot of people, especially kind of coming at it from the Debian perspective, where that's always how we build systems. Always give me a minimal install. I want like nothing on there, right? And I'm going to build it up custom to meet a specific need.

There's a lot of system administrators and engineers that prefer to build systems like that. Now, the existing CentOS installer definitely has a minimal category, right? You can specify minimal and you're going to get a small subset of packages, but people even want it less than that, right? They want like really super lean. So I'm just kind of articulating this as an example of all of the different ideas that people want to invest in

and play with and augment this very stable foundation and then build off of that stable foundation additional capabilities. Do you feel a lot of pressure to deliver at this point? I mean, I feel like I would. I have a media person who I work with through my company, and she's been tracking the various announcements and media and whatnot that's gone out on behalf of Rocky and just kind of tracking it for me and just kind of saying, OK, here's all the different articles that have been released this week and whatnot. And next to them, she counts and estimates and tries to get as much details as she can regarding impressions. Let's see, what has it been? A month? Just about a month now? 60 million impressions off of all of the different articles and documents so far that's been written is her estimate 60 million i have never i mean i've i i mentioned that to some of the core team

um and some of the people that i'm i'm kind of like uh leading it's leading a lot of the different aspects of rocky and they all said oh wow this, this is huge, isn't it? It's like, yeah, this is really big. We've been so focused and heads down on just figuring out how we're going to do this and making this happen that honestly, I haven't even paid attention to a lot of the articles that have been written that are out there. So for me to see a number that big and that many people that are interested in what it is that we're doing really just kind of, yeah, to your point about, you know, yeah, no pressure at all. There's a lot of people watching right now. So how do you deal with that pressure? I guess you're just, you're sort of realizing it

now or as you go. But I mean, there's a lot riding on this because in addition to that, I guess the flip side of that coin is this is a massive opportunity to do something awesome. And so I would have my own intrinsic internal pressure of, don't screw this up, Jared, because this is a great opportunity to do a really cool new thing. And the bug for bug compatibility is kind of cheeky, but it kind of bothers me too. It's like,

really bring all that baggage with us, you know, but nonetheless, you know, building upon this foundation that apparently lots and lots and lots of people have been using either not reluctantly, but just, you know, kind of like, what's the word where you're looking around and you're like, not contemporaneous. I don't know the word, circumspect, right? Like looking around for something else to come around that has the foundational roots that they desire, which is the core community aspect. And so here it is. Well, I wasn't all that nervous about it before you mentioned it, but now that you said it. Pile it on.

Don't screw this up for us. No, no. So it is a lot of pressure, but at the same token, there are hundreds of people working on this with me. It's not like it's me. It's a team. And it's a team. And this team is fantastic.

There are so many, and the variety of people, background, skill sets, expertise levels is so broad. How many different people from different countries, different organizations, different backgrounds and interests that are all working on this together. It really is something special. But what I'll mention is there's a lot of people that are carrying this right now. It is not just me. If I were to resign this tomorrow, there is no doubt this is going to keep going. But I enjoy being part of this. So I don't want to resign it tomorrow.

I like this. This is actually, this is a lot of fun. And I describe this sometimes as it's like we're having a constant party in Slack because there's so many people. We're having a great time. It feels like an underground movement kind of just rising up right now. And everything is taking shape. And people that want to become involved and want to do something like this are getting the opportunity to do something that's really a differentiator.

So we have people that, you know, we've had a couple of people that have come by that are like, you know, we've been out of work for a while. I've been looking for something to do, you know, due to COVID and everything else. You know, it's kind of a hard time right now. And we're all locked inside. And so this is giving not only people something to do, but something that differentiates themselves when they're looking for work, when they're looking for jobs. Now, all of a sudden, they are a contributor. They are part of this team to create a new operating system that the chances are is going to be impacting most of the tech employers out there. So it really is giving. It's sharing the load, right? It's sharing that responsibility.

And the team of people that have really stood up to make this happen is just phenomenal. It's a privilege to work with these people and this team. So it helps a lot in terms of that pressure. It's not just me. I'm nowhere near the smartest person in the room, thank God. Right? There are people that are coming with so much more experience, so much more background. Really, where my major value add is here is really just my experience in now running a project like this and leading this and helping to coordinate and organize.

Experience. I am not the person building the RPMs. I am not building the installer. I'm even looking at some of the infrastructure documents and I'm looking at it like I'm an executive which doesn't understand anything about tech anymore. I'm looking at this going, I'm glad you guys get what you're doing because this looks cool. It's pretty. Where you're at the right place at the right time with the right kind of momentum and you got the history and there's a lot that we can bring to things when we have that history like without someone like you who has this history

it'd be more difficult to organize the foundations that you're organizing upon. There were some numbers that was mentioned in an article that your assistant or whomever you mentioned, I can't remember how you defined her, was tracking on terms of impressions from the register. And it said that CentOS powers almost 19%. This is based on – I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate, but these are numbers that are on the register as part of somebody else's research. And you can tell me if they're somewhat accurate. So I would imagine that this kind of powering of the global web servers leaves a vacuum if the future of CentOS is in question or isn't production stable anymore. If that disrupts, like if that happens, it says CentOS powers almost 19% of all Linux web servers globally, which puts CentOS – or CentOS, sorry about that. Keep messing up. CentOS.

Second after Ubuntu Linux web servers with 18.8% share, way ahead of Red Hat at 1.8%. Yeah. And actually, the numbers that I've heard, while they're a little bit dated at this point, are higher than that in terms of CentOS. But I do think you're right. I mean, I think the register's right. Ubuntu has definitely been catching up considerably. The point is there's a vacuum. Yeah, there's a big hole now.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So speaking of Red Hat, is this overwhelming interest, let's call it, in Rocky Linux and just the groundswell of interest. Is this Red Hat's loss? I mean, what's your take on that? I mean, there's been plenty of people that feel like Red Hat has basically failed.

CentOS has failed the community. There's people who are mad at Red Hat. But there's also just like, they have that percentage. But then they had control, so to speak, of CentOS, of this thing, which they decided to change the way they were going to deal with it. I don't know, just curious your thoughts on like where Red Hat stands in all this. So first I'm going to cop out. I can't tell you how Red Hat stands, but what I can say is a couple of pieces that I think are really important pertaining to this. One is Red Hat did not make the decision completely unilaterally. They could have, from what I understand regarding some of the Santos agreements that they have in

place. I don't know them. I'm not familiar enough with them to be able to state definitively. But there is a Santos Board of directors. That Santos board of directors, as I understand it is the plurality or the majority of it, I don't know which, is in fact Red Hat. But there are people, part of the Santos board of directors that are not Red Hat. And from what I understand, this was a unanimous vote. So this is not just Red Hat. This is not like we shouldn't be blaming necessarily Red Hat for this shift. There is definitely a shift that occurred. I believe that that shift is in the best interest of Red Hat, but I don't blame Red Hat at all for that shift. I think this is, you know, I said the same thing when CentOS first kind of came to be when Red Red Hat end-of-lifed Red Hat Linux and yielded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat is a company. They have done a tremendous amount for the community and for Linux in general. They are, at least to my knowledge, the, if not one of the biggest open source contributor companies in the world. And all of Linux, whether you are using Red Hat or not, is benefiting from the contributions of Red Hat as a company. So Red Hat has to do what they need to do to survive. I don't know what decisions and what's happening behind closed doors, especially now that this has been acquired by IBM, but they need to be thinking first and foremost, fiscally for their for their organization, because success of Red Hat means

more success of open source projects. So that's I want to be really clear on that. Red Hat didn't do anything wrong from that perspective. Now, with that being said, I don't believe that CentOS belonged under the umbrella of Red Hat. I think that was a clear mistake. Did we talk about how it got there? No, not really. No. Could you give the elevator or just the brief how they ended up in control? Yeah.

Yeah. So I can give you the outside perception of this because, of course, I wasn't part of it. This is post or disassociationation this acquisition process okay so centos had as i said before a lot of drama kind of ups and downs and there was a couple times in which it got very slow in a release because it's very difficult to do a new release especially if there's only a couple people working on it and you know it was way behind and you know there's a lot of people kind of you know where centos what's going on with centos are we going to get a centos you know i think it was way behind and, you know, there's a lot of people kind of, you know, where's CentOS? What's going on with CentOS? Are we going to get a CentOS? You know, I think it was CentOS 7. It took quite a while before Red Hat acquired. And what ended up

happening is it was kind of going downhill, right? It was getting less and less contributions. They're just, it wasn't really, you know, on the up, it was on the down. And what happened was the core engineers that were running this at the time got job offers. And they got job offers by Red Hat. And as part of that aqua hire, is what I would probably call it, Red Hat was able to obtain the domain and the trademarks and all of that. And actually, I shouldn't say trademarks, the logos, because there was no trademarks at that point. I was actually surprised to find that Red Hat actually filed for trademark on CentOS, which kind of surprised me. I didn't

know that that would be possible considering how much, you know, how many, a decade plus of prior art in the community. I didn't think it would be possible to create a, get a trademark on it, but they did. And what ended up happening was these, these core CentOS engineers were hired by Red Hat to continue developing CentOS. And it just kind of ended up coming under their umbrella. I don't know if there was any additional agreements. I don't know if there was a big sign on bonus or anything that these guys got. I hope that they did, but I've got no visibility into that. But Red Hat did end up kind of getting a hold and running the CentOS project. Now, initially, actually, I had a number

of people first reach out to me and asked me if I would create another version of CentOS. And I said, no, let's see how Red Hat does with this. This could be good. And it was good for quite a while. Red Hat put in additional resources into CentOS, both in terms of packaging assistance, in terms of community assistance, documentation assistance. So Red Hat actually invested into CentOS and CentOS as a result kind of started to flourish again and it was doing really fantastic. So initially everything looked like it was going very well. So there's kind of a conflict of interest a little bit between Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a paid product and CentOS, which is a freely available paid product, kind of cloning

Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sorry. And there goes UPS. That's the life of code, man. I mean, deliveries happen and you're at home now. This wouldn't normally happen because you'd be in your office or somewhere else, potentially.

Now that's just how it works out, you know? Well, yeah. Nobody goes to the grocery store or anything anymore. FedEx and UPS and Amazon is pretty much everything. Well, you know, to Red Hat's point though, I mean, and I think even the point you made before is like, they're a business. And as a business, you have to optimize for certain measures to succeed or to sustain or to grow or to do whatever you're trying to do as that business and so i mean from a non uh you know i don't know how i describe myself i'm not deep into the trenches of linux and i'm not paying attention to all these details every single moment, but it's kind of interesting how they would acquire the necessary assets that made up CentOS over the years. And without, I would suspect, potentially lack of responsibility of it given this change and the reason for Rocky, which we're describing here. I think that that's sad to see that that's their perspective

as a business, but as a business, they have necessary measures to do to, to optimize for. And so this just falls by the wayside in the, in the realm of the massive brand that is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I mean, it's massive, as you've mentioned. So we're all just outside observers here, but I'm outside observing thinking, okay, I'm Red Hat. I have CentOS with 20% market share of web servers, community edition of this operating system,

and then I have Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1.8 or whatever that number is. And that's like top of the sales funnel, bottom of the sales funnel right there. Whatever it costs to maintain CentOS, I don't know that number, that's why I'm outside of Ziverine, you'd think it would be worth it to get

that sales funnel into the Enterprise Edition, but apparently whatever that conversion is, but there is a conflict of interest because why would I make this thing better when I can make this thing better etc it gets it gets icky but i would love to know the inside decision making i know you said it wasn't totally red hat that made this decision it was the board which includes non-red hat people but i would just love to know you know because they are privy to way more information than we are but Even as a business, why is that a good decision?

I think from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense because what they're doing is they're putting CentOS slightly in front of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Instead of trailing behind and mirroring Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it's a little bit in front. As a result, what this gives us is it provides I hate to call it a beta, but it provides a beta, provides a testing ground to know what is coming and what's just slightly ahead of the curve for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So from a business perspective and a Red Hat partner perspective, this this is really my biggest beef with it, which is the name CentOS to me and how it originally kind of originated is community enterprise operating system.

Well, we just made a decision that is not really in the best interest of the community, as you can see. Right. We just made a decision that by most people in the community standard is no longer considering an enterprise stable operating system. Right. valuable. And I think to a lot of organizations, it's still very valuable, especially as we start thinking about CICD, constant development, constant integration, and continuous, whatever, integration, continuous and development, and being able to kind of do rolling releases, it makes a lot of sense. But that's not everybody. As a matter of fact, that's not even the majority at this point. So I think red hat's pushing the envelope a little bit um and kind of moving people to a future that does make sense may make sense for a lot of people but it doesn't necessarily make sense right now especially i mean again as you can see

uh with with the uptake and the amount of visibility that rocky has obtained in very short order they rubbed people the wrong way. Well, what they did was they made it unsuitable for production use, which cuts out a lot. I mean, you take that 20% that's using it in production stages, and it's like, well, they can't anymore. Yeah. So they have, like, back to the vacuum.

Well, they can, but they shouldn't. Sure, okay. They can, but they shouldn't. But not with support, right? Like it's end of life. By the end of the year, it's EOL end of the year 21, right? So CentOS 8, you know, as a non-rolling release, is end of life as of the end of the year, as the end of 2021.

CentOS Stream, which is a rolling update, no longer having major versions, is going to continue being available. But as you said, Adam, a lot of people see that as it's ahead of. It's no longer enterprise stable. You no longer can necessarily count on that absolutely stable API. And that's where the community is now very nervous. I've had a lot of feedback at this point by a lot of, they would prefer their names to not be mentioned, but I can say very large organizations that are very nervous about this switch of CentOS, that they're leveraging CentOS for the majority of their infrastructure.

And this is why we are looking at things like FIPS compliance and whatnot, because this will actually take, uh, what they were using as, as CentOS. It'll actually take it up a level in terms of their compliance needs. And it's unfortunate, it may actually compete a little bit more with, with Ubuntu and RHEL then, because all of a sudden we're actually meeting those additional compliance needs. But this is what they're asking for. And they're willing to donate to the project to ensure that this gets, you know, you've done, I don't want to say that it's guaranteed, right? It's a goal, we're hoping to get this done. And we're going to see as time progresses on if it is in fact a possibility. And that's, you know, something we're shooting for. I think it's very possible that we will be able to get these additional levels of certifications. And I think it would be very valuable to the general community of users out there. Yeah. All this to say, though, Rocky, that's the whole point, really. This all gets us to the point like this is how CentOS was acquired. Its assets was acquired by Red Hat for their own reasons.

They've changed its direction, made it unstable for production use, not really good for the 20% enterprise or enterprise cases that are being used out there, leaving the vacuum and then therefore rocky. And then obviously the hockey stick you're riding right now in terms of growth factor. And that's a good place to be. This episode of The Change Log is brought to you by Render. Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks, and auto-deploys from Git.

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They're running my business. And I'm thinking, what's standing between me and running Rocky Linux on these machines? What is it between those two goals? And now I'm turning to you, Greg, founder of Rocky Linux. What has to happen for, because this is going to be a big deal for a lot of people, right?

You can't flip a switch and you're running Rocky Linux or maybe, but the switch has to be created, right? There's a lot that has to happen between now and then. So what does that look like and what are the challenges involved? You just nailed it. Eventually it is going to be a flick of a switch. But we have to of a switch. Oh, nice.

But we have to build that switch. So we're still building. Who's building the switch, Greg? There's a lot of work that's happening right now to build the infrastructure such that we can properly build all of the packages, all of the repositories,

and then the installer, such that people can very easily transition from existing CentOS into Rocky. Now, when it's time to transition, we foresee that it's literally going to be just one command. You're going to be able to copy paste a command. It's not even going to be incredibly unruly, but copy paste one command, put it into a root shell on your system, hit enter, and it will just do its thing. Literally, that's going to be a single DNF command. DNF, if you're not familiar, is the new version of YUM. And from that command, it will automatically replace the CentOS repositories with the

Rocky repositories. And from that, it will basically spin up a dependency chain on the CentOS trademarks and logos and whatnot, replace those with the Rocky trademarks and logos, and then automatically set you up so that every subsequent upgrade that you need to make is going to be now pulling from Rocky. Because the two operating systems are basically completely compatible with each other, you don't actually have to replace all the binaries in the underlying CentOS 8 system to move over to Rocky 8. So this means that it is absolutely a seamless transition. It's the equivalent of just doing a standard upgrade, or rather an update. Right. So that's great news.

The not so great news is that there is a, maybe this is good news sometimes for software projects, but the one that's putting a fire under y'all's butts is that there's like a hard deadline if you want to like never go out of support, right? Is that by the end of 2021 CentOS 8 CentOS? 8?

You guys are going to make me question this for the next week or two every time I see CentOS. Rocky Linux, real easy to say. So it's going to go out of support end of this year. Come January 2022, it's going to be a seamless

update, flick of a switch for the users whenever it happens, but how much has to happen between now and then? There's so many things that have to make that seamless, right? Yeah, and the biggest piece of this in terms of timeline is not what's on our shoulders. It's what basically enterprises and the processes that enterprises have to go through to properly validate and make decisions. This was a shock for me. I mean, you know, I came out of

academia, government and whatnot, and I spent a long time there. You know, when we want to make a decision, we just go talk to the right people and we just go do it. Large enterprises don't work like that, generally speaking. You know, when they want to change an operating system or do something along this line, they have to validate. They have to make sure that it's going to work. They have to get all the appropriate authorizations. They have to test. There's a lot of process that needs to go through. At least, generally speaking for large organizations, you're talking at least six months of time right there. So this means that whatever we do doesn't need to get done before December 2021. It needs to get done, you know, by at least, you know, the end of Q2, if not more like mid Q2. So that's what our target is. We're targeting Q2 to get the packages built,

the repositories up there, get everything signed, tested, and released such that now enterprises can start their testing process to figure out what do they want to do moving forward and are we giving them enough time to make that decision properly. Given the inertia, the vacuum, the momentum that's happening here, do you imagine there's going to be a big awareness campaign necessary to sort of make those out there aware of what's happening with CentOS and the changes? Like not everybody is in the trenches on the news. You got a lot of developers obviously managing these systems, but is there a sort of uphill awareness battle to deal with as well? In addition to all this extra creating of the switch, you know, and putting it out there by July one or whatever. I think that there is, but I always think there is,

there's always information to disseminate. Even the people that have, that have now heard about what it is that we're doing. I've actually, I've spent some time, you know, looking on Reddit and looking in various, you know, you know, posts and whatnot that people are putting out there. And I'm actually sometimes surprised about that people are putting out there. And I'm actually sometimes surprised about what people are saying about what it is that we're doing. Not because they're not in alignment or they're against it at all. No, I mean, almost everybody across the board is really excited about this, but there's a lot of misunderstandings in terms of what it is that we're setting out to do. First and foremost, we're setting out to basically have a transition path from CentOS.

So people that currently have their infrastructure built with that, they don't need to worry. The community is swinging in to save the day, in a matter of speaking. We're going to have that update, have that transition path available very, very easily. They're not going to have to worry about it. The people that want to continue on with CentOS Stream will absolutely be able to. No issue there whatsoever. It's just now we have a transition path for the people that aren't really looking at CentOS Stream and want to stay in alignment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So that, I think, is where we need to spend some time really just kind of getting the word out is in terms of this, this is a new operating system, but at the same time, it's not

a new operating system. Right. That sounds really kind of funny, but it's true. It's a resurrection in many ways. Yeah. It's a resurrection of old principles and unlaid, you know, plans that never really fruition quite the way you needed to project-wise and organizationally. You know, you have all the necessary things technically, but a lot of them kind of... And then obviously your departure, as we talked about before,

I'm sure a lot of that plays into how CentOS played out, and now you're just sort of resurrecting your original flag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's trying to think of anything. Yeah, what Adam said.

Yeah, what Adam said. Rocky Linux is here. The flag is up. Barrett, if you must, you will. Since we spent all this time bike-shedding the CentOS name, and we like Rocky because it's easy to pronounce, but what is the inspiration?

You may have mentioned it at the top of the show, but I can't recall. And then what has been the, you said there's been people complaining about Rocky Linux. So real quick, give us a minute on the name. So when I've come up with names of projects, in some cases it hits me right away

and it's like, yeah, that's it. And in other cases, I could be doubting it for months on end. Go, no, I don't really like the name or the whatever. I was going back and forth quite a bit and I was talking with a few other people and they asked me you know like what was the beginning of centos like and I started talking about you know very similar in the story you know when we were first we first started how it kind of unfolded and I mentioned you know rocky maga who was the person who first did the the initial builds of centos and i was

like oh rocky yeah that's actually and from that moment on it was just like obvious that's what we got to call this um he passed away he wasn't able to ever really kind of see uh where centos took off yeah and you know i i i think it would have made him very happy to kind of have that visibility. And but he never did. He never got that opportunity. So this gave me a way to kind of, you know, pay tribute to, you know, him being part of this initial team that never really got to see how much of an impact, a worldwide impact that Santos became to be. So it was immediate. It was like, ah, that's it. We're going with this. And then from that moment on, began the influx of people from the community saying, yeah, I don't really like the name.

Can we name it something else? Are you open to other ideas? And I'm like, you know, most things I'm open to hearing suggestions and whatnot on, but this one I'm like, no, not interested. You know what?

This is what it has to be. And they're like, but I can't go to my CIO and say this. It sounds too hokey and whatnot. And somebody else brought up, oh, you mean like CockroachDB? Right. Or Mariah? Or, you know too hokey and and whatnot and somebody else brought up oh you mean like cockroach db right or mariah or you know you come up right fedora's a hat i mean all these projects have funny names we google things all the time and like the first person who said google it's like are you serious google yeah that's not that can't be

a serious product google Google? Even Yahoo. I mean, it's like, you know, but we start, the names solidify after some time. And in Rocky, it makes sense. It's easy to say. It's very memorable. And it fits. Totally. So that's why it's like, you know, we're not having the discussion anymore.

We're just going with this name because if we don't the other the other side of this is what's going to happen is for the next three months six months however long we're going to be all debating the name anyway with whatever we choose so it's no you know what this one means something this one's good we're going to go with rocky and um but i'd say the the conversation of names still comes up. I was on Reddit just recently looking at that, and somebody posted something about Rocky. And everybody's like, yeah, but the name. What's wrong with the name? Right.

There's no perfect name, first of all. And secondly, we do word associations. And so everybody, when you hear a name, you immediately like, what comes into your head? And for me, it's Sylvester Stallone running up those stairs. There's a triumph to the name Rocky. And that's just me. I have a positive reaction to that. Maybe some people hated that movie or hate Sylvester Stallone or whatever.

And they're like, ah, boxing's the worst. But I have a positive. I think of that name. I think of a triumph. And it seems like this isn't so far as you're kind of running up those stairs to a certain degree so i i'm all for it i'm gonna stamp my approval not to mention phonetically easy one way to say it easy to spell pretty short two syllables like that's a great name aside from your friend rocky though is there anything in the logo that sort of is a subliminal because it's like a mountain kind of logo.

What's the logo? I didn't even see the logo. Jared's draw is from Rocky Balboa, so if it's just alone, the Rocky movies, the logo is a circle with a peak in it, and it seems like a Rocky mountain to some degree. I'm just drawing a conclusion there. There you go.

What do you think, Greg? I can't show this in a podcast where it's just audio, but you're right. the logo does have something kind of subliminal in there okay tell us um if you zoom in to a particular point of the centos logo it is actually exactly that angle that is the piece of a of the Centos, one of the squares in the Centos logo. I see. So you cut a section out and made a new logo from the old one. Yeah.

And you know now, that being a Red Hat trademark, now we're going to get all in trouble and whatnot. But that's one of the places where it came from. Inspired by, Greg. Inspired by. It's not really zoomed in. It's just inspired by what would happen if you zoomed in. If you thought that could be possible.

And the color is different. And the color is different. And we may not be using a font originally called the Red Hat Linux font. Or Red Hat font. We may not be using that because we forked it. Now it's called Rocky Linux font. Well, they say good artists borrow, great artists steal. And I think the greatest artists steal from themselves. And from Red Hat.

That's awesome. Well, let's not say steal for sure. Because that's not the truth. It was inspired. I like that. It was inspired. If you had that perspective, it would be inspired by that. Especially if you zoom into a very particular point of the CentOS logo. It definitely is very inspirational.

Yeah. So foundationally, you got a lot going on. You had to do a lot to make this all possible. The Rocky Linux Foundation Inc. is a thing. I mean, there's a lot of just goings on to make this possible, right. Like what are some of the details you can share behind making this possible? Because this is a very much in the trenches. You're doing it.

You're re-raising the flag. You're resurrecting the intentions behind CentOS with this. And there's a lot that goes into place to make it possible. Not just distribute tomorrow, but do all the things, the processes, the documentation, the company, the documentation, the company,

the 501c3, there's a lot behind this. You're bringing up some fantastic points. The first thing that I want to touch on is something you said right at the beginning, which is the Rocky Linux Foundation. So one thing that we have done in terms of how do we ensure that this is going to stay in the community? How do we ensure that what happened with CentOS does not happen with Rocky? And a big piece of that is to create an organization, a foundation that is as a very specific charter. It has rules, expectations. You can almost think of it like a social contract of what we are promising the community. And we will hold ourselves accountable to that promise. But the process of doing this, even the process of

accepting donations requires an entity to be formed. So we have formed the Rocky Linux Foundation. It is a Delaware organization. And we have put together all the necessary starting points such that when we're ready to go for tax exempt status, a 501c3, at least US tax exempt status, we can do that. But these are all of the foundational pieces that are necessary to do this. This has been, you know, it's a personal outlie of funds for me. My company that I work with, I work for, founded, we are also investing in this in the sense of sponsoring. So my company is putting money in. I put money in personally.

And what we want to do is make this so it is not about me. I definitely don't want to keep outlaying money if I can help it. And it's not about my company, right? It's separate. This is a completely separate organization really for the community. But there are certain costs associated with it. There are certain resources that we need to be planning for. And for that, we're actually going to be opening up donations and sponsorships, donations for individuals to put in some money to help out with some of the expenses, as well as sponsorship for organizations. We're still thinking through

what sponsorships will gain organizations. At the moment, it's really just to help us develop and help us manage the bills. But at some point, you know, we may be able to do something along the lines of, you know, giving organizations, you know, some amount of banner space on the website or something along those lines. But we have to be really, really careful because we can't sell anything. Right. We're going for 501c3. We're going for tax-exempt status, which means we're not selling products. We're not selling services. We can't. We don't want to. So that means, and it was funny, we had a conversation about merchandise

because we have an organization who's going to be setting up a merch store for us for Rocky Linux swag. And you can go there and get hats and stickers and shirts and all that sort of stuff and coffee mugs and whatnot. And one of the initial thoughts was, well, if somebody personally donates a certain amount of money, can we give them a shirt? And the answer is no, you can't. Because then it looks as if we're selling a shirt. And so we can't. So we're trying to figure out, okay, well, what do

we do? How do we handle this? Maybe it's a promo code such that once you've donated, you can now go and this other organization will give you a discount or give you a free sticker or something like that. I don't know what it will be yet. But these are the types of things now that we have to start thinking about because we are going to be going for 501c3 and it's very strict. And it's actually, it's very cost intensive in terms of working with people that have experience in doing this because it's a difficult process. And it's also a process that requires a certain amount of expertise. Yeah. If there's someone listening right now, that's like, I'm in. I want to sponsor. I want to donate. I want to give. I want to be a part of it. What's the first step to that? It's kind of vague what the next step might be or even

how you can, you know, maybe they just want to give you money. They don't care. What's the good first step regardless of the details that will play out eventually? So it's funny because we've set up a Google Suite account for RockyLinux.org. And I have an email address there. And there are a lot of emails coming in of people saying they want to contribute. They want to sponsor. They want to be part of this. And we haven't been able to keep up with them yet.

But I would definitely suggest, please do reach out to us. Send us a message. We're working on getting a donate button up. And we're working on getting the infrastructure set up. But I would definitely suggest, please do reach out to us. Send us a message. We're working on getting a donate button up and we're working on getting the infrastructure set up. But if you are interested, whether it's being part of the organization, whether it is contributing to the organization, or if you're a company and you want to sponsor what it is that we're doing, please reach out to us. The easiest way is just hello at RockyLinux.org.

But if you go to the website, RockyLinux.org, you'll see that there's a hello ad address there. But there's also a couple forms. There's a form to basically get into our Slack, which is going to be changing over to Matter Most in the next day or so. So we're going to be migrating away from Slack. So that's one thing to join. And you can definitely speak up there.

But the other one is we have a contributors form and this is contributing in terms of really just resources, not really money, but you know, people that want to be part of the project. And we've had like the last time I looked, it was approaching 500 people have filled out this Google form in just a couple of weeks. But definitely please do fill that out. If you're interested. Please join the Slack or Mattermost, depending on when you hear this, as well as reach out to us. Send us an email. And just realize it'll be a little bit before we get back to you. We're working on it.

Well, Greg, hey, you know, I mean, we're fans of what you're doing. Right place, right time, right experience, right ability, resurrecting that flag, standing it up. The Rocky flag is flying high, and we're excited about that. Is there anything we haven't asked you to share as part of this conversation? It's like, you got to share it. So that's a fantastic question. We've covered so much, and it's been a fantastic conversation. Really, I think the big kind of take-home points here is that we're working on a timeline.

We're working on the ETAs and we're trying to keep the community informed in terms of various announcements and letting people know about that timeline such that they can start making the important decisions that organizations and people are going to need to make to know, you know, what do they do? We don't want people concerned about if they have to immediately transition, if they can wait a little bit. As I said, we're looking at about Q2 to get code out there, but this is going to be solidified here in a community announcement that we're putting together, or rather a series of community announcements that we're putting together. And so to stay tuned in terms of being part of this,

this is 100% first and foremost, this is a community endeavor. We want people to join us. We want people to feel like they can be part of this organization, whether you are new to open source, whether you're an industry veteran, whether you are a coder, whether you're a documenter, whether you just want to be a community advocate, or just help with organization, whatever the case may be. If you've thought about ever being part of an open source project, please check us out. Join. We've got a lot of people. We've got a great community. And it's a lot of fun. I jokingly call it an underground party. So please do join in and help us out.

Be part of what it is we're doing. And we'd love to have you. Here on the air, I want to mention, I think it's a redirect, rockylinux.org slash contributing. So it's wiki.rockylinux.org slash contributor. What does it say? Contributing. So it's wiki.rockylinux.org slash contributing, which actually has a lot of details there. And even to be able to reach out to get on particular teams, so community team, branding team, development team, documentation.

So if you have a desire to play a role on any level, this page will probably be an ever-changing page. But for now, it's going to direct you to the right kind of places. So that's a good place, I would think, to start. Worst case, RockyLinux.org is a good spot to land. But, Greg, hey, thank you so much for sharing this story with us. And I think that's what's most fascinating to me, and I think Jared would concur, about doing the shows. We get to hear these kind of stories and really see the future where things are going. And you're very much helping to lead that in many ways.

And we appreciate you sharing that story with us. My pleasure. And I'm just, I'm happy to be part of this, this organization. And I'm happy that you guys invited me to the show. Thank you so much. And if you ever want me to come back, you know how to get ahold of me. You'll be back. Awesome. Thank you both. Thanks, Greg. All right. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you haven't heard yet,

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