CentOS co-founder launches company to support fork

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Rocky Linux is on track for a Q2 2021 launch, with $4m funding for new company to boot

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One of the original co-founders of CentOS has launched a new company that is hoped to support the development of a CentOS-fork.

Gregory Kurtzer announced Rocky Linux last year in response to the premature demise of the CentOS distro. The project received positive support from the community and also announced that it has received several offers for sponsorship.

Now, Kurtzer has launched Ctrl IQ with a $4 million Series A backing to support the development of Rocky Linux, along with other high-performance computing (HPC) projects.

Containerized HPC

Kurtzer is a veteran open source developer with a keen interest in HPC. In addition to CentOS he has also developed the open source Warewulf Cluster Toolkit, and the Singularity tool to extend containers and reproducibility for use in HPC and scientific computing.

“Machine learning, artificial intelligence, scientific computing and large-scale data analytics common in research and HPC are becoming a requirement in enterprise,” said Kurtzer who headed the HPC and scientific computation groups at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley.

Ctrl IQ lists several enterprise solutions in its portfolio starting with Rocky Linux, which it describes as an “enterprise Linux supported for cloud and enterprise.” 

Note however that while Ctrl IQ is a for-profit company, it is the non-profit Rocky Linux Foundation that manages the CentOS fork.

According to Rocky Linux’s January 2021 community update, the project is working to setup the build infrastructure, which they hope to finalize by the end of January. The project reassured that they “remain committed to delivering an initial release of Rocky Linux by Q2.” 

Besides commercial support from Ctrl IQ, Rocky Linux is also supported by AWS which hosts the project’s core build infrastructure. 

Via: ZDNet

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Mayank Sharma
Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.