Announcing Open-sourced & Community-Driven RHEL Fork By CloudLinux

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Someone is smarter then Red Hat/IBM, “Carpe Diem”:

Announcing Open-sourced & Community-Driven RHEL Fork by CloudLinux

(https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-community-driven-rhel-fork-by-cloudlinux)

CentOS is a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and undoubtedly a popular choice to deploy on production servers because of its rock-solid stability and compatibility. But, now with CentOS Stream, Red Hat just killed CentOS as we know it. And as expected, people started to fork Red Hat to give a viable community-based alternative to RHEL.

As we already maintain CloudLinux OS, we plan to release a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8
(and future releases) in the Q1 of 2021. We will create a separate, totally free OS that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions). We will sponsor the development & maintenance of such OS. We will work on establishing a community around the OS, with the governing board from members of the community.

Why We Are Doing It

We have all the infrastructure, software and experience to do that already. We have a large staff of developers and maintainers that have a decade of experience in building an RHEL fork, starting from RHEL5 to RHEL8.
We expect that this project will put us on the map, and allow people to discover our rebootless update software and Extended Lifecycle Support offering.

What Will We Do To Make Sure That It Doesn’t Go Wrong

We plan to make all the build and test software free, open-sourced, easy to set up, so if we ever go in the wrong direction – the community can just pick up where we left off.

What It Means For You

If you are running CloudLinux OS 8 – it will continue to have stable and well-tested updates until 2029, and ELS releases for years after that.

If you are running CentOS 8 – we will release an OS very similar to CentOS 8 based on RHEL 8 stable. We will provide stable and well-tested updates until 2029 – completely free. You will be able to convert from CentOS 8 at any moment by running a single command that switches repositories & keys.

Timeline

Q1 2021

—
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers Serbia, Europe

StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant

20 thoughts on - Announcing Open-sourced & Community-Driven RHEL Fork By CloudLinux

  • True. I just hope that the various alternatives will pool their resources. History has shown that RHEL derivatives require a lot of effort to maintain. It would be a shame to dissipate that effort among a number of competing distros.

  • One problem has been that RedHat, when they see a clone is successful, will tend to hire the lead developer. This is what happened to Scientific Linux, back when CentOS was late with a release (one of the head developers had the temerity to get married around that time and somehow, that took some of his time). Scientific Linux was gaining popularity and RH hired their head developer. This was before RH was bought by IBM.

    One assumes however, that this wouldn’t happen with OEL, though one never knows.

  • That’s a good point. It’s a perpetual whack-a-mole. But I prefer to whack an open-source mole rather than a proprietary one.

    OEL = Oracle Enterprise Linux? There is no reason in heaven or hell to trust them.

  • Considering that it is being spearheaded by the originator of CentOS, with the original goals of CentOS (before being swallowed by RH then IBM) as a stable, enterprise OS, I’m putting my support behind Rocky rockylinux.org and would urge others to do the same.

    I’ve been around the Linux world for many years and looked at and tried many distributions. Most of them are either unstable or bloated, or both.

    The only thing I’d trust Oracle to do is screw the computing community any way possible.

  • I agree. My current plan is to recommend we stay on CentOS 7 and switch to Rocky Linux for version 8, maybe in a year or so.

    Worst case scenario is Red Hat kills CentOS 7 (which would *not* surprise me at all now) and we need to bridge the gap with Oracle.

    My gut feeling is Oracle doesn’t see Oracle Linux as a money maker, apart from getting some support contracts from it, so they’ll leave it be for a while.

    We shall see…

    —

    *Matt Phelps*

    *Information Technology Specialist, Systems Administrator*

    (Computation Facility, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    60 Garden Street | MS 39 | Cambridge, MA 02138
    email: mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu

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  • I am not so sure that Oracle will do the same as RedHat … as it has done with other Communities that it has bought, I would honestly prefer something 100% community and that it gives us the necessary business tools to move to production 100% compatible systems, I think RockyLinux and what CLoudLinux intends to do is good and gives a wide range of possibilities to choose from.
    —
    Victor

  • Totally agree.

    —

    *Matt Phelps*

    *Information Technology Specialist, Systems Administrator*

    (Computation Facility, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    60 Garden Street | MS 39 | Cambridge, MA 02138
    email: mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu

    cfa.harvard.edu | Facebook <http://cfa.harvard.edu/facebook> | Twitter
    <http://cfa.harvard.edu/twitter> | YouTube <http://cfa.harvard.edu/youtube>
    | Newsletter <http://cfa.harvard.edu/newsletter>

  • Le 11/12/2020 à 17:14, Phelps, Matthew a écrit :

    I’ve just had a conversation with one of the Oracle Linux guys. I can’t really quote him publicly, but since I’ve already had some good experiences with OL
    ten years ago (when I installed the local motorway company’s servers), I guess I’ll just adopt a pragmatic approach and gradually move my servers to Oracle Linux.

    BTW, migration script works nicely on 7.x and 8.x:

    https://github.com/oracle/CentOS2ol

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • I would be very interested in any observations or insights you can offer in regard to Oracle Linux and your experiences with it.

    Now that’s an extremely useful thing to know.

  • I may also do the same thing and did a test install of OL8 and compared it to CentOS 8. OL really looks nice and as expected very similar to CentOS. Someone mentioned that KVM is a paid feature but I don’t think that’s really the case, does someone know more?

    Two things to mention are:
    – The Oracle EPEL seems not fully up to date.
    – DNF shows a weird behavior: ‘dnf check-upgrade’ shows .src packages which is something I’ve never seen before. Any ideas why?

    I’ve already updates our package monitoring to filter out .src pckages.

    Apart from that I’ve tested most packages of our inhouse repo and didn’t see any issues.

    That said, I’d really like to jump directly to RockyLinux but that’s something for the long run, not for today.

    Simon

  • Just an update, name of the project will be “Lenix”, and I missedin announcement that unlike CentOS they plan to publish all the build tools and environment so other clones can be built even if they stray, a very commendable approach.

    —
    Ljubomir Ljubojevic
    (Love is in the Air)
    PL Computers Serbia, Europe

    StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant

  • Sounds great!

    It comes to mind that if Lenix and RockyLinux (and possibly other major forces) could merge and join efforts as a common project, the project could gain tremendous momentum very fast.

    As was earlier mentioned, it is not easy to maintain such projects in the long term (despite goodwill), so joining forces would be quite safer for both the projects and the community, while it would also keep the community more focused, avoiding to disperse in multiple distros.

    In any case, this is the kind of projects we would want to see, rather than large corporations’ clones like OL.

    And what I like is that there is so much energy in the CentOS community, that so important new projects are being announced in day zero after CentOS suicidal turn to Stream.

    I am very confident that CentOS will live and prosper, but with a different name! (Unless IBM/RH **immediately** withdraw their announced plans and course of action.)

    Cheers, Nick

  • In the context of RHEL clones, I think we should use term “EL” instead of “CentOS”, that is now trademark owned by RH.

    —
    Ljubomir Ljubojevic
    (Love is in the Air)
    PL Computers Serbia, Europe

    StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant