Gregory Kurtzer said he had taken steps to keep Rocky Linux in the public domain forever to avoid what happened to CentOS.
Development of Rocky Linux began shortly after, in late 2020, Red Hat terminated development of CentOS, a community-based Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that had been in existence since 2004.
Rocky was named after Jason Dale “Rocky” McGaugh, a talented programmer involved in CentOS development, who died in December 2004 at the age of only 30.
Kurtzer said Rocky was a huge advocate of open source and a big fan of open source and he did not think he would have liked what happened with CentOS.
He said that the key for Open Sauce to survive was to register it as a non-profit organisation. The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
“The decision to bootstrap the RESF as a PBC and create the current organizational structure was made collectively by the board of advisors after significant deliberation. History has shown that there are always loopholes for bad actors no matter what the entity type is.
“This is why we feel that the integrity, accountability, and transparency of the people involved in the project is the most critical aspect for determining the long-term sustainability and viability of any project.”
The rules are so iron-clad that even the new organisation that Kurtzer is co-founder and CEO of, CIQ, would never be able to gain ownership of Rocky Linux.e president of marketing, who co-founded Linuxcare in 1998, and Art Tyde, a 30-year veteran of open source, who also co-founded the IT services firm. He also founded the San Francisco (and Silicon Valley) Bay Area Linux Users Group in 1994.
Kurtzer said he wanted to ensure t”hat not even CIQ can take over the project, noting “we’re not here to own an open-source project or control an open-source project.
