Community Update - June 2021

Announcements
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Community Update - June 2021

Summary

After seven months of long, hard work, we are beyond excited to announce that Rocky Linux 8.4 has reached General Availability for x86_64 and aarch64! We made fantastic progress with our release candidates and are happy to recommend this version for installation on your production systems. A migration tool is available in our GitHub repository, and release notes are available on our new documentation site.

Within 72 hours of launch, Rocky’s assets have been downloaded nearly 70,000 times from our Tier0 mirror, served from Fastly–not counting the number of downloads from our mirrors, of which we have nearly 100–and we count approximately 10,000 downloads of our torrent file.

To say that Rocky Linux 8.4 is popular would be an understatement.

You, the community, made this happen. We can’t begin to express our gratitude for your support. Watching the community grow from a comment in a blog post in December to what it is today, with teams around the world working on documentation, development, branding, security, infrastructure, and more, has been one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences we’ve ever been a part of.

We have two sponsor/partner updates that we’re very excited to announce:

Google has signed on as a Principal Sponsor of the RESF! As such, Google understands the importance of Rocky Linux as a free, open, community enterprise operating system. Providing resources for testing and validation, their sponsorship ensures Rocky’s status as a first-class citizen on the Google Cloud Platform from day one, with supported images immediately available for launch.

Additionally, Microsoft has signed on as a Partner of the RESF! In their own words:

Linux is the fastest growing platform on Azure, running in over half of VM cores. For well over a decade, Microsoft has been investing in Linux, and with partnerships being a central pillar of Microsoft’s open source strategy we collaborate with RESF and the broader Rocky Linux ecosystem to ensure customers have an increasing set of options to deploy Linux workloads on Azure in a supported, managed and secure way.

Details on how to find and launch Rocky Linux on Azure will be soon forthcoming.

Team Updates

Leadership

We’ve received a few questions from the community about the structure of the RESF, and while this information has always been available on our website, we made updates for clarity. Summarized, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) formed in Delaware (file number 4429978), backed by a board of advisors with access control policies that utilize the principle of least privilege and separation of duty to ensure that no action can be taken unilaterally (not even by the legal owner, Gregory Kurtzer). For more information, see our Organizational Structure.

Documentation

We launched a more user friendly documentation website. It’s easier than ever to contribute now, and we’re always looking for new content. Anyone is free and welcome to contribute, so please reach out if you have an interest.

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Sincerely,
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation
https://rockylinux.org

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I cannot thank you enough for all of the hard work you guys put into this. We are commissioning new cluster this summer (1536 cores) and whole centos situation was a big head scratcher for us. Now we have clarity, and guess what OS will be flying there. Yup, Rocky Linux FTW!

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Feeling really silly here, but can I ask an honest question?

In answer to my comment on the r/CentOS subreddit that I’m seriously considering adopting Rocky Linux for my company servers I was informed by “Rabiton” (whoever that is) that such a decision would be a Very Bad Idea as the RESF is personally owned by Gregory Kurtzer and any questions as to the veracity of Rocky Linux as a Public Benefit Corporation would find me shunned, weeping and cast out of the city gates.

I’m assuming that I’m just making a fool of myself, but should I truly trust the statements about checks and balances and such? I’m really liking the performance of Rocky that I have on my test server but these comments have me wondering.

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Hi Sherzeg,

This is not a silly question at all, but I do have to comment on the FUD and misinformation that is being circulated. And now they are creating throwaway accounts to do this (https://www.reddit.com/user/Rabiton) as well as downvote Rocky comments and threads?

Why? … Just why?

Now, to your question… It is up to you if you trust me or not, but I’d suggest that you don’t have to. What we’ve created is bigger than me.

Let’s play with this…, what is the worst I can do? Rocky Linux is a bug-for-bug compatible version of Enterprise Linux. I don’t even have controlling access to the infrastructure (by design). We’ve open sourced EVERYTHING necessary for others to do this and thus it can be easily forked if someone was so inclined. Considering we’ve made so many promises and I’ve been very active in the open source community and moderately well known in HPC. I, like most people have made some mistakes, but if I were to purposefully sell out the community, I can pretty much forever kiss my reputation, career, and accomplishments goodbye.

Now let’s focus on truth instead of FUD. I own the RESF because I’ve gone down the shared ownership 501(c)* path before with the Caos Foundation (the org that hosted CentOS) and within a couple of years, CentOS was manipulated out of the non-profit. Long ago, Freenode used to be under the PDPC which was a 501(c)(3) in Texas, and that too was removed from the non-profit (I worked and knew Rob when he created the PDPC – RIP lilo). I’ve seen other 501(c)* entities created within the open source realm, some of them having better results than others.

What I’ve learned was that simply being a non-profit is not a magic pill for honesty and integrity.

So we decided to go with a PBC (Public Benefits Corporation) and be very clear that we are not motivated by profit, but rather public benefit as we’ve stated early on in our community charter. Our values are amongst honesty, transparency, and integrity and to that point we are open to independent audits and reports of the finances, org structure, as well as the infrastructure and assets. This path seemed to be most in alignment with what our goals are and the easiest way to get there.

Do I have to be the sole owner of the RESF? No, and at some point we will revisit this, as well as becoming a non-profit. How long did Linus Torvalds control and “own” Linux? Did that stop you and others from using it? No.

Thank you for raising this question, and as always, I am personally always open to discuss concerns regarding the structure. And if you want more than just my word for it, there are also 14 other members of the RESF board of advisors who you can also talk to.

Warmest regards,
Greg

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This is fantastic to hear! What kind of research are you doing and how do you manage your clusters?

Have you seen our HPC SIG in the Mattermost?

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Thanks for your response. Believe it or not, it actually means a lot that you responded personally. I actually sent the original message half tongue-in-cheek and had decided some time ago to go with Rocky Linux (especially considering that I’m one of the registered testers.) I only sent the message to the Rocky community because I was curious as to what kind of response I would receive after Rabiton (or whatever his name) urged me to send just one message and watch the Rocky community drop me like a bad habit, which would be counter to pretty much any of my 21 years’ experience with the Linux community.

Coming off my tangent, I’m looking forward to many future years using Rocky Linux on my production servers.

–Scott

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Addendum: If I had a modicum of business acumen, instead of just being a friendly neighborhood computer geek, and I had a product in the public domain, I’d probably organize some level of corporate control for its administration.

–Scott

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Hi Scott,

It is great to meet you and I’m grateful that you reached out to us! That person (Rabiton) bet on the fact that you wouldn’t actually reach out to us. You proved them wrong and I appreciate you for doing that!

I hope you join our Mattermost instance as well at (https://chat.rockylinux.org) to get to know all of us better.

It’s crazy, over my career, I’ve never experienced anything like this. Reading things that haters have written about me in comments, social media, and literally following our media and trying to discredit me personally and the RESF. It is hard to believe that adults actually behave this way.

I hope others follow in your footsteps and just ask me or the team directly if they hear any FUD being spread.

Warmest regards,
Greg

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It’s going to be used for standard stuff like finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamic, mainly. We have a couple of research groups with plenty of crazy ideas requiring efficient number crunching machines.

Existing old clusters run Bright Cluster Manager but for managing this shiny new thingy we are keen to try first something basic like say Foreman for node provisioning and AWX/Ansible for config management.

Yup, keeping finger on the pulse of HPC SIG indeed :slight_smile:

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What is your take of OpenHPC, or the new version of Warewulf (which I mostly wrote LOL)?

Thanks and good luck to ya!

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@gmk -
Thank you for bailing us (the collective US) out, and congrats on the Google and Microsoft support of RESF. Just ignore the naysayers - the downloads of this project speak for themselves.

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Chinese translation：Rocky Linux 社区更新-2021年6月 | Rocky Linux 中文社区

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Thanks a lot. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Any plans for an official docker image?

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Yes, Rocky Linux is currently available on Docker Hub as rockylinux/rockylinux and we are working on getting it added to the standard library.

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link for the lazy