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.
