CloudLinux investment for more than a Million Dollars into CentOS clone

I’d stumbled upon this news sometime ago and thought of jotting down few points that rushed into my mind. Let’s first of all see who is CloudLinux and what bet are they making in this regard.

CloudLinux OS is a Linux distribution marketed to shared hosting providers. It is developed by software company CloudLinux, Inc. CloudLinux OS is based on the CentOS operating system; it uses the OpenVZ kernel and the rpm package manager. CloudLinux was founded in 2009 by Igor Seletskiy.

As you just read this it’s clear there bread and butter seems CentOS which is not only the base but also a backbone which indeed makes sense when such a decisions are to be made in order to persuade the prophecy which CentOS beholds from what a giant am I from it’s parent company Red Hat Inc. from where it derives its source code. Now let us read some of the statements made over the internet.

When Red Hat, CentOS’s Linux parent company, announced it was “shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release,” it lost a lot of friends. CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, immediately announced he’d create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. He wasn’t the only one. CloudLinux also proclaimed it would create a new CentOS clone Lenix. And, CloudLinux shall pour money into this perhaps a more than a million USD.

Now do note here that Lenix is not something which is a complete and still under development just like Rocky Linux which I’d write about here. Lenix is just a placeholder the name shall be disclosed later when things brew up in Linux world. The point which I wanna make here is that the shift if it goes well should be absolutely seamless and painless here is what is being surfaced. Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO and founder, explained, “Red Hat’s announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions. We promise to dedicate the resources required to Project Lenix that will ensure impartiality and a not-for-profit community initiative. CloudLinux already has the assets, infrastructure, and experience to carry out the mission, and we promise to be open about the process of developing Project Lenix.” […] Project Lenix will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything.

-> via ZDNet, Red hat blogs and reddit.