Rocky Linux was created in response to changes within the enterprise Linux ecosystem, particularly around the long-standing relationship between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its community rebuilds. RHEL has traditionally been distributed as a commercial operating system, with its source code made publicly available under open-source licences. This allowed third-party projects to rebuild RHEL source packages into free, production-ready operating systems while maintaining full binary compatibility (Red Hat, 2020).
For many years, CentOS Linux served this purpose. As a downstream rebuild of RHEL, CentOS provided a stable platform with long-term support and predictable release cycles. It became widely used across enterprise infrastructure, cloud environments, and academic institutions, where consistency and compatibility with RHEL were essential (CentOS Project, 2019). In practice, CentOS was often treated as a drop-in replacement for RHEL in non-subscription environments.
In December 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS Linux would be discontinued and that development focus would shift to CentOS Stream. Unlike CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream operates as a rolling distribution positioned upstream of RHEL, providing early access to changes intended for future RHEL releases (Red Hat, 2020). While this model supports faster development and community feedback, it no longer provides the stable downstream rebuild that many organisations depended on for production systems. In response to this news, Gregory Kurtzer, one of the original CentOS founders, announced his intention to deliver a community-owned, downstream, RHEL-compatible operating system. See the original blog post below or view the full thread at the following link: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/#comment-183642
Rocky Linux was founded from this. Rocky Linux is governed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), a non-profit organisation established to ensure openness, neutrality, and long-term sustainability (Kurtzer, 2021). The project aims to maintain strict 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL, offering a stable and predictable platform suitable for enterprise workloads without reliance on a single commercial vendor.
In the video below, Gregory Kurtzer discusses his experience transitioning from CentOS to Rocky Linux, the factors that led to the discontinuation of CentOS Linux, and how his experience in leading open-source projects has shaped the goals and governance of Rocky Linux.