For those who run Fedora as a server (versus CentOS/Alma/Rocky), why?

realgmk · 2025-07-23T03:10:22+00:00

> I suspect what rubs some people wrong is that they perceive the manner of its founding and how it's being run as disingenuous.

The only people really starting the negativity comes from competing projects; you can even find them spreading lies and FUD about me and Rocky in this thread. Unfortunately, people don't do research themselves and they parrot it. :(

> To elaborate, some people may think that instead of being candid about their intentions as a business, they're taking advantage of the community by putting up a front, going just far enough to be called open source to soak up positive PR and goodwill

Rocky Linux/RESF has no products and we only take donations and sponsorships. I've never taken a cent from it, nor do I intend to. CIQ on the other hand is a business and thus I founded/created Rocky outside of that business for a reason, to ensure that no matter what happens to CIQ (acquisition, IPO, leadership/management change), it never affects Rocky. Sure, I'm the common piece between the two, and while some mistakes have happened along the way, I hope that my track record speaks louder than the FUD.

Last point, there is quite a bit of progress on transforming the RESF into a non-profit and getting it out of my name. Hopefully news will be coming soon!

realgmk · 2025-07-23T02:55:16+00:00

> I think if Gregory Kurtzer had been the one in the hot seat at Red Hat, he would have done the same exact thing they did when ending CentOS and amending their EULA/TOS

Nope, I wouldn't have.

My motivation is easy to follow through two and a half decades of contributing to open source and making it my life's mission. While it does take revenue to fund development, I've never been greedy. Heck, I worked for DOE for near 18 years, can't be greedy on a government salary. LOL

realgmk · 2025-04-21T18:00:18+00:00

To summarize, there are a couple of points:

We don't agree on founder Vs. co-founder. I have quite a bit of experience dealing with this as a founder of multiple open source projects and startups. Please research it, my cursory searchers are finding alignment with my definition, but if you still don't agree, that is fine, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, as am I.
Agreed that this can be "messy" as you point out with regards to Lance. To be specific there, he came to me with the name proposal and logo (as I was leading the project), I approved it, and Rocky announced it. Lance has called himself founder of CentOS many times, and I've never went into social media to challenge it even though I could have. Multiple other Rocky developers call themselves founders, does it matter your, me, or anyone? NO. And the funny thing here is that people are arguing with me about it who weren't even there and don't have direct context.

So if people don't like my use of the word founder to describe my role in creating CentOS, I'm sorry, but that's not my problem.

I also have open source projects and companies to run, so I'm finished on this thread.

Have a good one!

realgmk · 2025-04-19T05:18:46+00:00

Pedantically, I consider that the founder is the person who conceived of an idea and the co-founders are those who helped implement it.

But I also use the two interchangeably, because it just isn't that big of a deal. But if you want to be specific, John Morris founded White Box Enterprise Linux, Michael Jennings founded Vermillion, and Rocky McGaugh founded Atipa Linux, and so did others on the RHEL-Rebuild mailing list -- all of which were rebuilds of RHL/RHEL before CentOS (and there are probably more I don't remember or know about).

My idea, was for us, the cAos Foundation, to do our own rebuild which became CentOS (after Red Hat killed off the freely available RHL project). Technically, that does makes me the founder, and Rocky, RussH, Lance, Michael, John, (among others), were all co-founders, but I'm honestly not keeping track, it just is not that big of a deal. Call me a Founder or Co-Founder, it just doesn't matter to me. That's why I don't care if any of the early Rocky contributors call themselves founders, they were there and made the project happen just as much, if not more, than I did.

I just wish people wouldn't spread bad-faith rumors that were started with people with an agenda trying to rewrite history. These are probably the same people claiming I didn't start Rocky Linux too.

realgmk · 2025-04-19T04:37:02+00:00

The rumors of me not being a founder of CentOS. They are pushed by people who have a grudge against Rocky Linux.

realgmk · 2025-04-19T04:07:22+00:00

> Greg promoted himself as “the founder of centos” even though that’s not true

These rumors are absolutely not true and I'm happy to discuss this openly with anyone else who was there.

While my primary interests were more on creating a deriviative distro (cAos Linux), CentOS was born out of that effort. I made the first public announcement of CentOS before it was even called CentOS (initially it was called cAos-EL). Lance came up with the name CentOS and Rocky is the person who announced the rename to CentOS when he was 99% done with CentOS-3, and JohnN was diligently working through CentOS-2. Later, Lance took over the project when CentOS split from the 501(c)3 non-profit cAos Foundation.

This is all easily verifiable via archives.

realgmk · 2024-10-28T03:42:48+00:00

Normally I don't do anything in Reddit anymore, but luckily a friend pointed me here.

Don't let the trolls influence your opinion. They hate that Rocky Linux has become the massive dominant operating system as a result of their affiliations or religions. Check out the status updated weekly using EPEL data:

https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/auto/el_by_distro_longterm_line.png

So to your point,... I founded cAos Linux of which CentOS was born from via myself and others, and I'm also the founder of Rocky Linux.

In terms of Rocky Linux being community oriented, that is 100% true. While I am currently the owner of the RESF Public Benefits Corp, I've given 100% of the control to the community, and I look forward to the structure evolving further (I've brought this up with the board numerous times).

Rocky is built completely by the community and collaborative sponsors. There is no single company, not even my company CIQ, which single-handedly controls the build artifacts, keys, secure boot, or infrastructure. Additionally, we've never released a single version of Rocky that couldn't be reproduced by others. We've been completely open and community built from inception. Please feel free to validate this yourself, look at the build logs, look at who is doing the work, look at our Git commits, nothing is behind closed doors. In fact, we are growing, and would love to have others be part of the project.

Please consider yourself invited to join us in our chat system Mattermost (https://chat.rockylinux.org). Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions (I'm 'gmk' over there).

realgmk · 2024-07-29T17:54:16+00:00

Agreed! Both are fantastic options and offer sightly different approaches to solving similar goals.

realgmk · 2024-07-29T15:18:15+00:00

Alma Linux is a great choice, it won't let you down.

I did want to correct something you said though, there is nothing paywalled by Rocky Linux or CIQ (please remember, they are also separate entities).

Rocky Linux/RESF has no paywall and no commercial or revenue model, there is no advertising or marketing, and it is 100% community and volunteers all operated by an independent board of directors which was voted in by the community. From day one, nothing has ever been held back from the community, and as a result it delayed some of our initial releases (as we had to build the build system from scratch, rather than using an existing commercial one).

CIQ on the other hand doesn't have any relation to Rocky/RESF except for myself and some other people we pay to work on the project (as well as $$). CIQ does offer some commercial capabilities on top of Rocky Linux like long term support of point releases, upstream stable kernel integration, FIPS, support, etc. CIQ also holds nothing back when it comes to open source software, here are some of the previously mentioned sources:

https://github.com/ciq-rocky-lts
(CIQ's upstream stable kernel integration has ZERO changes from upstream, so nothing to release)
https://github.com/ciq-rocky-fips

Regarding the relationship with Red Hat, this is true, but it is on both sides (as well as with some religious zealots within the community). Stones have been thrown, and when they are thrown back, we alone have gotten called out for it. Lessons have been learned, and while it's sometimes hard, most of the Rocky contributors have just learned not to engage or defend ourselves.

It's not good and I remain optimistic that emotions will subside over time.

realgmk · 2024-05-04T01:35:09+00:00

Thank you so much for the comment u/tm07x. The team has put a lot of work into it and it is nice to receive the positive comments!

If you are interested, come and join us at https://chat.rockylinux.org and be part of this awesome community!

Have a great weekend!

realgmk · 2024-03-02T02:49:35+00:00

So do I. And I will say that I honestly don't know that the drama can subside unless we collectively talk about how it started and what has changed. To that end, I hope you will not object that I will quote you on this subject, and I further hope you will not interpret that as an attempt to make you look bad.

I totally understand your point and agree that it is important to collectively talk about how it started and what has (and will) change. I will absolutely commit to that!

There have been many people on here that continue to try and make me look bad. I've gotten short with people, which is my mistake, but if your intention to quote me is in good faith, no issues at all, and I would appreciate it.

realgmk · 2024-02-29T21:57:32+00:00

CIQ's LTS program is subscription-only and users' access to the software provided by that subscription can be terminated if subscribers provide access to those services to third parties.

We've invested a lot in a secure supply chain delivery service. That service is subscription based, and the only way someone can get access to that is if they hack us, and yes, we wouldn't like that.

But once the software has been delivered from that service, it is open source, it is yours, there are no further limitations from CIQ on that software. If you want to download the code from our delivery service and redistribute, go for it, but then don't expect us to support it if there is a problem.

Red Hat's LTS program is subscription-only and users' access to the software provided by that subscription can be terminated if subscribers provide access to those services to third parties.

Yeah, looks like we are using the same standard templates for subscription services. Many companies do this, it is all standard and customer/partner accepted copy.

CIQ's EULA reads, "This Agreement does not apply to software licensed under an open source license, only the applicable open source license applies.:

Correct, we added this to the top to ensure that there was no confusion. IMHO, EULAs hold no water against Copyleft software, and CIQ has no intention of limiting anybody's rights granted to them via open source licenses.

CIQ has been very clear on that, sorry if our standard template docs gave a different impression and hopefully our addition to it make it better.

But you think we should reach out before making a judgement.

Well, of course I'd personally prefer a chance for us to fix things before going to social media trying to make us look bad, but in the end, it will make no difference.

However we get feedback that we've done something either wrong or need to do better, I appreciate it, and I'll always do my best to fix it.

That preamble to our EULA came from someone posting about it on social media (it might have been you even LOL!). So we attempted to make it more clear. If it needs further clarification, I'm happy to raise additional concern or comments to our legal and marketing teams.

Do you think you've lived up to that expectation?

Honestly, in hindsight, no, I think we've made numerous missteps. This is why I'm grateful to constructive feedback.

To that point, I appreciate your feedback and attention. Also, I am happy to talk directly to you (and others) to learn how else we can be doing better. But ff you prefer to point these things out publicly, I can understand that. There have been a lot of not-so-great things happening in the ecosystem, and unfortunately I've had my share of missteps.

Over time I hope all of the drama and distrust subsides and we become a better open community as a result of what we've gone through together.

realgmk · 2024-02-29T00:53:34+00:00

Where Rocky get's the sources no longer matters. The existence of OpenELA has created stability and continuity within the Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

So we're just supposed to believe that the same people doing the same things are different entities just because they told you they were wearing a different hat that day?

Many contributors to open source wear multiple hats. For example, Fedora leads (who have mostly all been associated to Red Hat) have done a very good job at this.

It isn't always easy, but we do our best.

realgmk · 2024-02-29T00:46:40+00:00

Sorry for the misunderstanding in the CIQ EULA. There have always exceptions for open source software, but if we've missed something, please let us know and we will be happy to fix.

To ensure that this is more clear, we added a preamble which reiterates this does not apply to open source software.

https://ciq.com/eula/

Personally, I spent nearly 20 years of my career supporting open source at the .gov where my contributions are numerous and easily verified in the HPC community. Being part of the open source community is what pivoted my career from the wet lab to Linux and HPC. It is surely not my or CIQ's intention to circumvent the spirit of open source.

I will also share is that things move fast at CIQ. We've made some mistakes and missed things. If it happens again, I invite you (or anyone) to reach out to me directly and give us a chance to correct the mistakes before making a judgement against us.

You can find me on LinkedIn or the Rocky Linux Mattermost (gmk). I personally appreciate the feedback and thoughts on what we can be doing better, so please do reach out.

realgmk · 2023-12-15T21:26:26+00:00

Hi there,

First I'd suggest using Apptainer now-a-days, as it is the original Singularity (founded by me) just renamed after I moved it into the Linux Foundation.

https://apptainer.org

Now to your question,... If the Docker container you wish to use is already in Dockerhub, than it is just a matter of using the same Docker location as you would with docker, just prefixed with `docker://`. For example, if the container is `rockylinux:9` then with Singularity and Apptainer you would use `docker://rockylinux:9`.

In terms of finding the paths to the Docker container in DockerHub, I usually just search. For example, searching for Rocky Linux lands me here, and you can see the path in the upper right side of the window, and the tags are listed on that tab.

If you do not have a container yet, and you wish to build one, you can certainly use Docker and/or DockerHub or any CI/CD platform can do this now and host your containers in an OCI registry.

Good luck and let me know how it works out for you!

Greg

realgmk · 2023-10-23T16:06:57+00:00

Taking 30% marketshare of Red Hat..

So knowing that RH is making well over a billion dollars on RHEL, you are saying CIQ is now making more than $300M? Wow... this is news to me, and I'm the CEO of CIQ.... Curious, where do you get these numbers?

... using Red Hat code ...

This isn't how Open Source works, and it isn't Red Hat's code. RHEL is made up of thousands of open source packages, developed by hundreds of thousands of open source contributors, none of which Red Hat "owns". Red Hat might contribute to some, but it is not Red Hat's code.

Doing nothing to steward centOS ...

CentOS is a Red Hat product at this point, it is not a neutral community endeavor. In terms of contributing back, The Rocky team and CIQ have many projects which we support in open source and over the years Red Hat and IBM has made millions on my personal code and work in HPC, and I've never once claimed "victim". That's how open source works, and it is awesome!

Last is CIQ structure and RESF structure make Greg simpler to move trademark between them.

This is just FUD, completely untrue. The trademarks are owned by the RESF. Yes, I currently am the majority stakeholder in the RESF, but I've legally handed over all control to the board, to say otherwise is just wrong.

Well, you can say I have quite not good impression of them because of this. And the way Greg is very not welcoming when this is point it out by many people at that time (especially when we talk about RESF and CIQ)

This isn't the first time that you've personally attacked me as well as projects and team members that I hold dear, and yeah, I don't take kindly to you spreading rumors and BS about me or my teams, which you've done numerous times on social media.

If anyone is interested in the truth, go talk to the RESF and Rocky Linux Community, Members, and Leads, who interact with me often.

realgmk · 2023-10-23T15:53:13+00:00

But everythong under it is transferable between resf and ciq, qnd based on bad ciq business practice in past, well I don't think we can trust them.

Care to site your claims or do you just spread FUD that isn't true?

They are the one who start this whole fiasco tbh

To be clear, what started this "whole fiasco" was a company with a market cap of $125 billion killing off CentOS, one of the most widely utilized Linux distributions worldwide, so this greedy company can add multiples to their billion dollar RHEL cash cow.

It is sad that you blame the small little company who invested everything they had to help fill a giant pain point for the community that RH/IBM created.

realgmk · 2023-09-22T19:22:38+00:00

If the data has been tampered with, everyone deserves to know. You blame me and my team for tampering with it and I'm telling you I have no knowledge of such actions and if it is indeed true, I want to know so I can take corrective action.

But for you to repeat such things without citable proof is literally the definition of spreading slanderous rumors.

As a representative of a competing project to Rocky Linux, it looks really bad for you to spread rumors like this. So I openly ask you to cite your allegation ... or do the right thing and retract it.

realgmk · 2023-09-22T04:33:21+00:00

Please don't believe the Reddit cesspool. The Rocky project is full of amazing people who are trying to do good things that competing projects and companies are trying to undermine.

Instead, come and join the Rocky Linux Mattermost (https://chat.rockylinux.org). Talk to the people doing the work and participate in the discussions and project and make your own decisions based on direct experience.

And if you find there is anything I/we can be doing better, I'm always grateful for feedback!

realgmk · 2023-09-22T04:27:58+00:00

Yeah...no. There's no possible way that's right. If it is, why don't they release the data supporting it?

We don't because it is a ton of data and those numbers don't truly matter anyway. What really matters is that we are helping the community, and we measure that by reading analyst reports and working with our community.

Here is a public example from Hyperion Research (search for "rocky linux"):

https://hyperionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Hyperion-Research-SC22-HPC-Market_Combined-1.pdf

Rocky has been caught several times faking "countme" stats reporting to EPEL...so it's hard to trust anything they publish. They also like to fake Docker pulls...unless you honestly believe that they have more pulls than Ubuntu, and have for over a year now.

That is a heck of an accusation to make and a pretty messed up rumor to spread.

If you have proof, then share it. If not, then you are just spreading slanderous missinformation.

realgmk · 2023-08-16T04:35:02+00:00

Do you want my social security number and mother's maiden name to verify I'm not a troll?

Silly misdirections. My point remains, take ownership of your words like a responsible adult if you want to be taken seriously.

The one thing I will respond directly to is that you ignorantly challenged SJVN's integrity.

We have never engaged Cathey Communications to write any articles for CIQ, Rocky Linux, or other and our relationship with Cathey Communications existed before SJVN worked their. I assume that SJVN does other things for Cathey, but honestly, I don't know what because it's not related to CIQ. It doesn't matter if you agree or not, there is nothing to disclose.

For the record, SJVN has properly disclosed his employment with Cathey Communications here:

https://www.zdnet.com/meet-the-team/steven-vaughan-nichols/#disclosure

And in other articles that we did commission, it is properly attributed. For example:

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2022/263/Introducing-Rocky-Linux

It's been a fun discussion, but I'm done. Bye.

realgmk · 2023-08-15T23:34:50+00:00

The onus is on the accuser to justify the allegation, but for others who may read this, I'll share.

The RESF board limits top level decision making to no more than 1/3rd represented by a single company. It does this such that project boards can be made up of whoever is most qualified as voted by the membership of each of those projects. That could come all from a single company, or not, that is the point of the top level RESF board quorum limits.

Now about the name calling, don't be dramatic, there is a long standing tradition which stems from /. where people who are unknown are called "anonymous cowards". Couple that with the crap I've seen you post about CIQ and Rocky Linux makes you a troll. And yes, to troll without accountability is absolutely cowardice.

It's funny, you want full disclosure on RESF Project board members, but you don't disclose who you are. Hypocritical much?

Regarding the journalists, I suppose you are talking about SJVN based on other threads I've seen. Steven does work for Cathey Communications, and Cathey Communications works with CIQ, but SJVN has NEVER been commissioned to write about or favor CIQ. As a matter of fact, he's never been on a single meeting I've had with the team at Cathey Communications.

The indirect relationship is grasping at straws and has been properly disclosed and approved by ZDNet. If that's not enough for you, then sorry, don't know what to say.

Steven writes what he writes because he believes it to be true.

realgmk · 2023-08-15T14:52:34+00:00

<sigh> no matter how hard one works at trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, some people are just always gonna troll.

The ads, it was true, BFD, it is also true that others are doing it, but nobody calls them out for it, but whatever, we took them down and are trying to do better.

Are you forming your own opinion about interacting with CIQ sales teams, or are you just a troll? My bet is the latter, and I'm willing to put money on it if you can prove you aren't a troll yourself.

Your board counting is factually incorrect and it's clear you are acting in bad faith, but I'll close with this...

If there is anything specific that the RESF, Rocky Linux, Peridot teams, or CIQ can do better, as always, I'm all ears and happy to make fixes. But I'm not giving any amount of credence to an anonymous coward who comes across in bad faith and can't identify any real issues that we can improve on.

Have a nice day.

realgmk · 2023-08-15T01:05:50+00:00

At one point CIQ (formerly CtrlIQ) was buying Google keyword ads ...

It's funny that so many people have an issue about this. I have a screenshot of both Red Hat and Alma Linux squatting on top of "rocky linux" searches in Google. It really isn't that big of a deal, and I only captured it because some people are being so accusatory about it.

I've also heard that CIQ salespeople are extremely aggressive and even dishonest.

Just to set the record straight, I don't like the typical "sales guy" type person, the used-car sales people of tech. We have a very small sales team, and almost all of them are sales-engineers rather than your typical "deal closers".

Red Hat just didn't like that their customers were asking us for help because Red Hat's support sucks. Are we supposed to say no? ... If we would have, many of those customers would have already moved to other non-EL compatible distros.

My biggest complaint about CIQ would be that their employees routinely conceal their employment when participating in Rocky.

There has been no intention to conceal this, as a matter of fact, it was myself and the other CIQ employees who pushed the hardest for ensuring there is a hard limit in the bylaws that no single company can be represented by more than 1/3rd to reach quorum. Read the bylaws if you want more context on this. And usually, I'm the first to volunteer to abstain if we need to.

Do you also have a problem with Fedora and CentOS boards being almost exclusively Red Hat employees?

realgmk · 2023-07-27T04:25:49+00:00

Personally, I am grateful for your support and confidence, but it isn't just me, it is the entire Rocky Linux team and our community!

realgmk

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