Open-sourced & Community-driven RHEL Fork by CloudLinux OS Creators

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 operating system (OS) that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions). We will sponsor the development & maintenance of such OS and work on establishing a community around this OS, with the governing board from members of the community. 

Based on the research conducted on CloudLinux website with 1,500 Linux enthusiasts, most of the current CentOS® users (61.5%) are going to wait for another RHEL® fork to be released instead of migrating to Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE or other free or paid operating systems.

It is obvious that another viable enterprise-grade community-based alternative to RHEL® is required, as migration to the Debian-based or any other non-RedHat® OS will create the additional workload, downtime for the business of any size. 

Therefore, CloudLinux Inc., announces the 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. CloudLinux will create a separate, totally free operating system (OS) that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions) & will sponsor its development & maintenance.

Why Are We Doing It

1. We already have all the infrastructure, software and experience for that. There is a large staff of developers and maintainers and CloudLinux 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 for end-of-life operating systems offer. 

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 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 for 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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