AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux Discuss Their Projects’ Missions and Goals
Gregory Kurtzer from Rocky Linux and benny Vasquez from AlmaLinux talk about their respective open source Linux distributions, both of which are downstream RHEL rebuilds designed to be alternatives to CentOS.
This video is from the webinar, “Exploring the Post-Centos Landscape with AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux” that took place on June 8, 2023. It was moderated by Javier Perez, Chief OSS Evangelist and Senior Director of Product Management at Perforce Software.
To watch the full webinar, click here: https://ter.li/1z4d5l
For more information on Enterprise Linux support from OpenLogic, click here: https://ter.li/tdifx5
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Transcript (lightly edited for clarity):
Javier: I was going to ask you, benny, if you could share again briefly about the AlmaLinux project and the foundation, your objectives. What do you want to keep building from this?
benny: Sure, yeah. It's really simply stated. We are doing, and we're set up to do, whatever our community wants. It is driven by the people that have invested their time. It is driven by the people who have the most stake in the future of Alma. That's the thing you'll always hear me say -- if you have a stake in the future of AlmaLinux, I want you to have a voice in the future of AlmaLinux. That's why foundation membership is free. Individual foundation membership is free because I want people to join. I never want us to end up in a situation like we did with CentOS where none of us were involved in the conversation. We didn't get to understand how that was going to go or provide our feedback in any way.
At this point, all of the work that we're doing is based on somebody joining our chat or sending an email that says, "Hey, I wanted to do this thing, but I can't because of this. How can I get around that?" or something like that. Every single thing we're working on is to solve a need of somebody that is using AlmaLinux on a daily basis or wants to use AlmaLinux on a daily basis. It's really fun to be driven in that way because it means that we're always encountering new stuff and we also get to build out a plan that isn't just whatever Red Hat releases is what we release.
Javier: That's the open source way, right?
benny: Yes. Exactly.
Javier: Definitely the open source way. Greg, I assume you have some similarities there in terms of your goals and what do you want to do.
Greg: Oh, absolutely. So we created the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation for very similar reasons, but in addition, to ensure that no single organization, company or profit-driven initiative can ever hold hostage the project or any of the projects. We've actually found that this vision as well has been adopted by other organizations as well. We're actually talking to other open source projects about joining the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation as well.
So definitely, there's a need here. We saw this issue. Just like Benny said, there was not a lot of people at the table, I should say, that was representing the community when these decisions were made and it had a very adverse reaction and effect to that community. So we wanted to ensure that that never happens. Right from the beginning, we ensured that no company can control this, no company had a majority stake either in terms of control or in terms of the technology, the stack, the build infrastructure or any of the artifacts that were needed, necessary dependencies, to what it was that we were creating.
So we always had to be vendor neutral, 100% reproducible, such that anybody can come and reproduce everything that we've done. We've already had that happen with at least one other Linux distribution that we know of at least. I'm aware of several big companies now using all of our build stack to modify and create their own variance of it. For us, we believe that that is exactly what needs to be happening.