Announcing Open-sourced & Community-Driven RHEL Fork by CloudLinux

CentOS is a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and undoubtedly a popular choice to deploy on production servers because of its rock-solid stability and compatibility. But, now with CentOS Stream, Red Hat just killed CentOS as we know it. And as expected, people started to fork Red Hat to give a viable community-based alternative to RHEL.

As we already maintain CloudLinux OS, we plan to release a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8 (and future releases) in the Q1 of 2021. We will create a separate, totally free OS that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions). We will sponsor the development & maintenance of such OS. We will work on establishing a community around the OS, with the governing board from members of the community. 

Why We Are Doing It

1. We have all the infrastructure, software and experience to do that already. We have a large staff of developers and maintainers that have a decade of experience in building an RHEL fork, starting from RHEL5 to RHEL8.
2. We expect that this project will put us on the map, and allow people to discover our rebootless update software and Extended Lifecycle Support offering. 

What Will We Do To Make Sure That It Doesn't Go Wrong

We plan to make all the build and test software free, open-sourced, easy to set up, so if we ever go in the wrong direction - the community can just pick up where we left off.

What It Means For You

If you are running CloudLinux OS 8 - it will continue to have stable and well-tested updates until 2029, and ELS releases for years after that.

If you are running CentOS 8 - we will release an OS very similar to CentOS 8 based on RHEL 8 stable. We will provide stable and well-tested updates until 2029 - completely free. You will be able to convert from CentOS 8 at any moment by running a single command that switches repositories & keys.

Timeline

Q1 2021

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