I started using Red Hat Linux in 1997, version 4.2 (Biltmore). Over the years I’ve used Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware (I talked many times with Patrick Volkerding, great guy), Mandrake Linux (Open Mandriva now), SuSE Linux (before the Novel acquisition), FreeBSD and a little bit of Solaris. Funny enough, I have a Red Hat developer account, however, I don’t like using RHEL because of the entire subscription thing. It’s just annoying to me that every time I run dnf it calls home, or that it sends info about my servers home, or that if I don’t sign up with Red Hat Insights it will nag me until I do. However, I do love the environment and how everything works. I’d rather use CentOS Stream than deal with all of that. Thankfully, I don’t have to thanks to Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
No emotions here, and after Alma’s announcement, I’m pumped that they decided to move on beyond simply cloning RHEL. I wonder what course Rocky Linux will take from here on out.
Watch this, a very good video:
Here is a summary of the video:
- The video starts with an introduction to a podcast episode where Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and Executive Director of RDSF, is interviewed. Greg shares his journey with Linux and open source, and his background in biochemistry.
- Greg talks about the creation of Rocky Linux, inspired by SentOS, a community-based distribution of Linux created when Red Hat Linux was discontinued. He led the SentOS project for a few years before it was acquired by Red Hat.
- The video discusses the end of life for the CentOS Linux community and the transition to CentOS Stream. Greg expresses his excitement about recreating CentOS and announces the creation of a Slack group for interested individuals.
- The video touches on the infrastructure portion of the operating system and the process of building it. It also highlights the close working relationship between Red Hat and CentOS teams.
- Greg discusses the creation of a new project called Rocky Linux, which aims to fill the void left by the discontinuation of CentOS. The project has spent a lot of time thinking about the organizational and ownership structure to avoid the issues faced by CentOS.
- The video discusses the importance of maintaining control over a board and organization in order to effectively manage projects. Greg believes that it is not a good idea for companies to own and control open source projects.
- The video discusses the relationship between corporate entities and open source projects. It emphasizes the importance of strong backing for open source projects to prevent outside influence.
- The video discusses the sustainability of open source projects and the importance of commercial support. It highlights the need for a large number of individuals and companies to contribute to and sponsor open source projects for them to be sustainable.
- The video discusses the collaboration between different organizations in the development of cloud technology. It also touches on the trend towards rolling releases and the balance between stability and innovation.
- The video discusses the desire for a more traditional release cycle and stability in enterprise software. It mentions the excitement about the future of technology, including Kubernetes, microservices, and containers.
- The video discusses the importance of having different distributions that people can use based on their needs and preferences. It also highlights the challenges that still need to be solved, particularly in the areas of high-performance computing and orchestration.
- The video concludes by discussing the need for diversity in orchestration and scheduling of resources in order to modernize high-performance computing. Greg shares some exciting use cases of Rocky Linux, particularly in scientific computing.
- Towards the end, Greg expresses his enthusiasm for these developments and his personal reasons for being excited about them. He mentions being able to focus on and facilitate everything from medical science to energy research to physics and astronomy.
- The video discusses the use of big national labs, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and government entities to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. It also mentions the development of a new cloud-native build system.
- The video ends with a thank you message expressing gratitude for discussing and improving Rocky Linux, as well as for sharing insights and being a guest on the show.