CentOS Linux

» see centos.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There is a question that arrives with every server somebody hands you and no budget to go with it, which is what you put on the thing. For about fifteen years that question did not require any thought. You put CentOS on it. It was Red Hat Enterprise Linux compiled out of the same published source with the trademarks stripped off, which meant the box you tested on behaved like the licensed ones in the rack, and you paid nobody anything at any point.

It started as a side effect of a license. Red Hat sells support, not software, and the GPL obliges it to publish the source for what it ships, so from 2004 onward a small group took that source, stripped the logos out of it, and gave the rebuilt result away. Gregory Kurtzer had been running a project called cAOs Linux since 2002 and CentOS came out of that work. The first release landed on 14 May 2004 as version 2.1, a rebuild of a Red Hat enterprise release from two years earlier.

It got large in a way volunteer projects rarely do. By July 2010 it had passed Debian to become the most common Linux on web servers at close to thirty percent of them, which is a strange sentence to write about a distribution with no company behind it and a website that looked finished in an afternoon. It also had the governance of a project that size in 2009, when an open letter went up saying that a founder named Lance Davis had disappeared the year before while holding the domain registrations and the donation account. The domains came back that August.

This one is mine in the ordinary way that infrastructure is anybody's. I am an engineer and I have spent my working life around machines that somebody has to keep running, and for most of that time the free answer and the correct answer were the same answer and nobody had to argue about it. That condition ended on a Tuesday in December 2020 and a lot of people found out from a blog post.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a rebuild is ~

A rebuild is not a fork. A fork takes the code somewhere else. A rebuild takes the same code to the same place and refuses to charge for the trip, which sounds like a joke and was the entire product. Software written for one ran on the other. A vendor certifying an application for Red Hat was certifying it for CentOS whether the vendor liked it or not.

That is why it ended up under so many things. Hosting companies ran it because the margin on shared hosting cannot absorb a per-machine license, and universities ran it because a grant covers hardware and does not cover subscriptions. Appliance makers shipped it inside products and never mentioned it anywhere. All of them got the stability of a ten-year enterprise release cycle for nothing, which is the specific thing Red Hat was selling.

~ what red hat changed ~

Red Hat announced in January 2014 that it was taking the project on and that the trademarks were moving to it. That was widely read as a happy ending, and it was defensible: the developers got salaries and the build infrastructure got funded. It also meant the copy and the original now had the same owner, which is a position with only one obvious move in it.

The move came on 8 December 2020. Investment would go to CentOS Stream, which sits ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than behind it and is therefore not a stable rebuild of anything, and CentOS Linux 8 would end on 31 December 2021 instead of running to 2029 as everyone had planned around. Cutting eight years off a published support window is what did the damage. People had bought hardware against that date. CentOS 7 was left to finish its own cycle and stopped getting updates on 30 June 2024, and that day is the actual end.

~ the forks ~

Two replacements existed within months, which tells you how much demand was sitting there. CloudLinux put out AlmaLinux, beta on 1 February 2021 and stable at the end of March. Kurtzer, who had started the original, came back with Rocky Linux, named after a co-founder who had died, beta on 30 April 2021 and its first stable release that June.

Both do the same thing CentOS did and both now do it while Red Hat makes the source harder to obtain, which is a fight that has run since 2023 and is not finished. The wider outcome is that the free enterprise-grade server operating system did not die, it just stopped being a single obvious answer. There are now two of them and a nagging awareness that whoever owns the upstream can change the terms on a Tuesday, which is a thing nobody had to think about between 2004 and 2020.

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