I seriously though about Rambo when I saw Rocky…nice name!
I hope this project make something of real. 
Like founder involvement with MySQL to MariaDB, so to goes CentOS to Rocky. I have been a CentOS user since version 4. As I am happily using MariaDB, I am even more excited to move to Rocky Linux.
Hi all,
I totally disagree with white on black for the forum. It’s horrible. Looks like a teen video game.
Michel-André
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I’m told the decision has been in the works since before the IBM acquisition and that is based on engineering process and releases internal to RH. Which means the reason, as far as RH is concerned, are technical, not political or personal. So I would not expect it to change. This is how they are going to proceed, so Rocky is probably the best solution forward.
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Something in me tells me it’s rather financially motivated because the shift of technology is changing for years now. It’s not a secret that on premise is dying.
When I say shifting, I mean less IT companies are deploying RHEL servers and are instead moving to the cloud. And most providers offer some sort of management or support included, which means they would care less if they run Red Hat or CentOS or what ever operating system as long as their platforms work. If you think about this, it’s bad for Red Hat, as people move to the cloud, companies like Amazon or Oracle offering their own distros, they need less Red Hat subscriptions. This without taking into account that containers are the new thing and Red Hat while they tried to gain some market with CentOS Atomic they didn’t. Its Alpine that is taking that market based on its small size, simplicity and security. That also means the host OS is even less important. Again does not look great for Red Hat.
CentOS is basically RHEL without their support, but if you are acquiring it as part of a bigger service in some cloud service, or another SaaS solution that covers everything, you don’t need RHEL subscriptions and support as your provider covers that. This is more likely why Red Hat is not interested on having a bug by bug clone of Red Hat. IT is buying less physical servers, and they are also buying less operating systems.
On a side note, they also wanted to take advantage of the already huge existing community, this why CentOS Stream came probably to their mind, why not leverage that community, so we can further improve the main OS with bugs and fixes. Turning CentOS into upstream of RHEL instead of downstream seems to be precisely that. Using the huge open server and providers market as a feedback market. From a business perspective it does make sense for them not to have a RHEL clone. But that boat already shipped. On a sidenote, maybe they realized since other RHEL clones already exist, including huge companies like Amazon or Oracle why keep supporting CentOS with their own resources instead of turning it to a useful tool for their own purposes.
The biggest problem I see is how they came up with this drastic change. Even dropping support for CL 8 to just one more year speaks instability and uncertainty. I would be cautioned to use Red Hat for any bigger enterprise project in the future because it seems they are testing waters lately by killing so many projects and making overnight decisions. That does not seem like something planned with proper documentation, schedules and meetings, but rather something a group of people would do over a night of drinks out, lets just pull the plug and go ahead…they did damage to their open source model which is basically the foundation on what the whole company is build on top. If you cannot trust them for open source, you can not trust their commercial offerings either.
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You can set it to discourse default in Account/Preferences/Interface of your account.
Hi Robb,
That’s what I did but for newbees who don’t know…
The default should stay the default.
Michel-André
Is the name final?
Rock Linux sounds like a rock solid Linux which is what it is and may sound more publicly preferable.
Yes but explaining that to exec’s who do not realize that a brand survives by the trust it instills in its consumers and providers and NOT in other board rooms is the key. They will not get it in my experience sadly.
I downloaded Oracle 8.3 into a VM to take a look around. So far I have been unable to find what matches the CentOS PowerTools repo for it, so Oracle is no substitute for me.
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Did they not rename it? If so, it’d be something with “codeready-builder”, which is the RHEL designation.
Seems to be the case based off their site: https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-8.html
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The CentOS brand is tarnished by this, dropping the 10-year support from CL 8 sends a distrust message to the open source community that relied on CentOS and just upgraded. And since CentOS is owned and managed by Red Hat you can basically explain management in words like they are five-year olds that it’s the same people behind. If you add into the equation how IBM works, things get even more dramatic. I have watched Red Hat kill many open source projects in the past years or abandon them. It’s changing into a very different company, one that seems to lack vision and is just playing around with different things to see what sticks and what no.
Unless management in your organization is very tech or IT based, then it’s your job to inform them and explain what companies they should go with it and who they should try to keep at distant. I personally have killed million dollar contracts with Oracle for some companies. In the end, if you are good at what you do, management will trust you and it’s your final word, not the CEO, nor the director, yours. Good leaders delegate.
The only exceptions I see is with specific franchises that force specific brands or companies, and I can tell you right away its just corporate bribery. The CEO’s or IT in charge at those brands receive huge benefits from companies like Cisco, Oracle, HP and others, and they then force down only a specific vendor. If that is the case, there is nothing someone can really do but then again those organizations have no problem spending what ever nonsense they need to pay for a solution that is not worth even a fraction of that, but you are paying the brand name. I care little about brands and companies sizes, I have seen them all in tech and worked with most. Any company is just as good as the humans behind them and if you see the best talents leaving a company or moving on, its trouble ahead for that company regardless of how big they are, this even more true when get acquired/merged or there is a big change like a new CEO. Things can go uphill or downhill at that point. When a company is purchased by Oracle or IBM, stats predict that things go downhill based on almost every company and product they purchased in the past decades.
What happen here with CentOS is what people predicted when IBM acquired them. It took them 2 years, but most had a very bad feeling about this. IBM of course is trying to distant themselves claiming this was a decision already made by RHEL before that time. Which is of course not true, because initially CentOS 8 was not supported only until 2021. They did that on the fly.
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Thank you for that - that is indeed the PowerTools repo. I may have been looking in the wrong place but I could not find a “release” package that enabled it so I hand-crafted a .repo file that references it. But in a sense that’s going a little OTT to enable those packages.
That sort of omission does make it hard for me to suggest Oracle as a CentOS replacement at work and right now I have no intention of doing so - we’re mainly a CentOS shop right now. Thankfully my management tree have given me the ultimate decision on what we do. I will be keeping a keen ear to the ground for Rocky Linux, but for now I have slammed the brakes on any migration to CentOS 8 (we do have some C8 boxes) and have switched back to CentOS 7 for new deployments. Additionally, given Oracle’s recent history regarding Java (it’s been free for decades, now they’re wanting money for it) there’s no guarantee once they’ve got a critical mass of users they won’t suddenly turn round and say “OK, you need to pay to continue using our product”. I just don’t trust them.
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If we have problems with IBM/RH because they backstabbed the CentOS project, why take any chances with a company that has proven to destroy Floss projects.
For me, oracle is a no-go.
Just my 2 ct
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I agree. I just spun it up in a VM to take a look around as it had been mentioned around. I’m not exactly impressed (though their UEK kernel seems to have support enabled for my aging, but still in occasional use Iomega parallel-port ZIP drive… should test that.)
Edit: Yep, it works.
But… UEK makes yum crash with an illegal instruction error. RHCK kernel it works fine, but no PPA driver. Not sure how they managed that one…
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I like this name. Just Love it.
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Long live the Rocky Linux.
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Well, I received this news after migrating all my infrastructure to CentOS 8 rather recently. This 2021 thing really feels like a stab in the back, as I’ve always been an avid supporter of RedHat and CentOS. Rocky Linux it shall be!
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I am sticking with Fedora, for now…Because, I don’t have a production server. I write web site code and I write with LibreOffice. I use multimedia software as well. Fedora serves that purpose well. I have a gripe with both Fedora and CentOS…NO WIKI Manual for those who don’t go to forums that much. I envision for ROCKY, a WIKI Manual with a set up checklist; and a search field where questions can be answered either with it, or pointed toward a specific forum. I am a POWER USER who is still learning the ins and outs of linux. I want to be a PART of Rocky and do social media work for it! CHEERS and HAPPY CHRISTMAS! 
- Markus McLaughlin, markusmclaughlin.net, Boston, MA
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