Episode 821 transcript

FLOSS-821

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week we chat with Gregory Kertzer and Krista Burdeen about Rocky Linux, it's history, based in CentOS, where it's been, where it's going, and more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 821, recorded Tuesday, February the 11th. Rocky Linux.

It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we've got something, we've got a treat today. We've got something really fun. We're going to be talking about CIQ. That is a technology company that you may be familiar with. Better know as the home of Rocky Linux.

And we've got Gregory Kurtzer and Miss Krista, whose last name I've forgotten. Shame on me. But we've got both of them for the show today and I am once again, flying solo, no co host today, definitely need to work on that scheduling issue. We will get that straightened up for our next show. I am sure. But let's not let's not talk about that.

We're not here to talk about the Floss Weekly Scheduling. Talk about the software and the people and the projects. So welcome both to Christy, Krista and Gregory. Thank you both for being here. Thanks. It's great to have you. It's great to be here.

Gregory: Yeah. And Chris actually. I have a quick question for you.

Okay. The way you framed it in the intro is going to mislead people right off the bat. I'm happy to go with it and then correct it, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to not have it misleading right from the beginning that we have to go back and correct, but it's up to you, however you want to do it.

And sorry. Go ahead. Immediately as you go to us, we're immediately already in edit mode. I'm sorry,

Jonathan: edit mode. Whatcha talking about? This is content, so go . So go ahead and correct it. So, and I, I say things like that and I, I thought of this when I was saying it, you know, I don't know that that's exactly how their structure is set up, but I know that that's the way people are gonna think about it.

And so this is a question, this is an instance of me saying something dumb on purpose so that you guys get the chance to set the record straight.

Gregory: I love that. And and, and, and so I'm going to jump in on this and Krista, I'm sure you have thoughts on this as well. There is a. There is a lot of confusion about what C.

I. Q. Has done and what Rocky has done. And what is the relation between the two? And I'm actually, I love the fact that we're starting this literally talking about this because there's been so much confusion on this. So when, when, when Rocky first came to be, and this may go a little out of order because maybe we'll come back and talk about this.

But when Rocky first came to be I was, you know, I had a startup called C. I. Q. And we needed to We needed CentOS, like what we were doing, we required an operating system to be part of the stack that we're creating. And so when CentOS went away, it kind of left us in, in kind of this, this, this weird spot where we needed a, we needed a solution.

I raised my hand to the world and said, you know, I'm going to, I'm one of the co founders, original co founders of CentOS, and I'd love to recreate the same, but he wants to join me. I'm hanging out over in the Slack over here and, you know, come up, come and hang out. And immediately, like so many people joined.

I think I even put in that original posts that or the comment to the, to the post where I first announced this, that I'm even willing to hire some people to go, to go help me and do this. So again, if anybody wants to come and join. You know, coming to this community now, it's, it's really important, I think, to mention that one of the first decisions that C.

I. Q. made here was that we don't want to own this. We don't want to control this. This is something that needs to be a community project. It belongs in the community. And so C. I. Q. did not try it. To like own it or, or, or control it. As a matter of fact, right from the beginning, this was a hundred percent community and CIQ did something that I'm actually unaware of any, but any other companies doing most companies that, that operate in open source have a commercial open source or core open source business model where they have a an open source project.

Which they control, like it's in their GitHub, they control it. Decisions in many cases happen behind closed doors. I don't like running open source projects like that. This is not my first company and none of my companies have ever done that. So I always try to keep everything as a community project as much as absolutely possible.

So, Rocky always stayed outside of CIQ. From where it was hosted, to how it was hosted, to the leadership. And the people who were in charge. It was never, never CIQ and, and directly controlled or anything like that by CIQ. Now, CIQ was a huge supporter of Rocky Linux. And so there's a lot of confusion there because CIQ has done so much to facilitate Rocky Linux.

But I really want to stress this point. CIQ does not own or control Rocky Linux in the slightest. As a matter of fact, there's a huge community behind Rocky Linux that is so much bigger. Then, then what? Then, then any single company that is bigger than C. I. Q. It's bigger than any other company in my opinion, because I love this community and I love what the community is doing.

And again, C. I. Q. Is here to help to foster and to provide assistance as necessary. But we even have like charter bylaws in the charter that says, That no single company can ever control the board and that includes CIQ. So I just wanted to jump in, Jonathan. I apologize for totally like side channeling the, the, the

Jonathan: podcast.

We had a plan, man. We talked about this.

All right. So let's jump back. I appreciate that because if, if people only hear one thing, I suppose that's sort of the most important but let's jump back in history and talk about Gregg's. where he comes from and why you had a passion for community enterprise Linux and why you were in this place to even be able to respond at all.

So what's, what's the backstory? Where, where do you come from? And why, why is why is CentOS something that you, that you have cared about for so many years?

Gregory: So I've been, I've been part of the open source community. Really since I got super interested in, in, in computers I graduated with a degree in biochemistry.

And from there went to work at a bioinformatics company and this bioinformatics company was using big Unix systems to do a lot of our genomic searches and whatnot. And then, and then the person I was working for said. You know, I think we can do this cheaper and more effectively with this thing called Linux.

And this was in the mid 90s, so this was still fairly early. I didn't hear of Linux before that. I thought he was just mispronouncing Unix or was being funny. And but it turns out, like, there's this really cool thing, Linux. And we actually went to Fry's Electronics. If you remember Fry's way back in the day.

And we got a bunch of motherboards, a bunch of processors, memory. built up a few kind of, you know, well equipped computers and we downloaded. I don't even remember what the first version of Linux it was that we downloaded, but we ended up settling going between Debian and early, early, early Red Hat.

And and, and we installed it, you know, downloaded it off of, I think it was a 28. 8 K modem and installed it via floppy disks onto this, this hardware. And we created a scientific tool. We created something that I was able to go and do research on, and my colleagues were able to do research on. And. It completely boggled my mind because I've never heard of anything that anything like this was possible, that you can just go and download an operating system or or or software that is truly valuable without having some sort of tie in back for, you know, making money and having it held over people's head.

And you know, you get like, you know, a freemium model, like you get certain amount of things like, you know, I remember like McAfee, you know, antivirus at this point was just starting to get big and but they had, then it was free, but there was a commercial model behind it. There was no commercial model behind this and it totally intrigued me.

So I got super enthralled and interested in Linux and open source and it became a very, very strong passion of mine to the point where I gave away, I kind of gave up my. Where I focused on my degree and I kind of transformed it into, you know, I want to do, I want to do Linux, I want to do open source and, you know, I ended up doing a few, a few cool jobs.

My first job in Linux was working at a a company called Linux care. And LinuxScare was one of the three main kind of initial companies in the late nineties doing Linux. There was Red Hat, there was VA Linux, and there was LinuxScare. Red Hat still around, obviously. VA made a huge amount of of you know, noise out there because they blew away all the records for an IPO.

And LinuxScare, well, we were on a great trajectory, but we didn't quite make it past that, that hump. And as a result, a lot of people have kind of forgotten about LinuxScare. There's a lot of really cool stuff. Jonathan, at some point, it'd be a lot of fun to talk about kind of the early days back then and what things were like, but I got even more enthralled with the culture of open source through Linux care.

I worked with a ton of amazing people in the open source community. You know, everybody from kernel developers to user space developers to device driver writers. We were part of early LSB and I worked with some of the people doing LSB. I worked with Angel, Andrew Trigil Rusty. A whole bunch of like amazing people, Chris Yeo.

And what I learned was that there was this so much passion behind open source and it just completely transformed how I saw the world. I actually, at some point, maybe I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, but I actually thought open source was the way to solve All world problems because with I worked with developers and other people that were in other countries.

And in some cases, our government called the hostile nations. But those were people just like everybody else. And we all got to work together and it was super cool. And, so I actually saw it is this is like this is even above politics. This is this is like we're all just people. We're all working together for the same goals.

So I got super interested in it. When you have a background of open source and Linux and air and interest in that in a background in science it's pretty easy to kind of land squarely and high performance computing. And I spent a long time working in high performance computing and in the In 2000 I ended up leaving Linux care and going to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

And in that role, I was immediately kind of put into high performance computing areas. And I created my first open source projects there. My third or fourth open source project was a little operating system called chaos Linux. And the idea of chaos Linux was it's Debian, but kind of for RPM based.

And the idea was I loved RPM. I liked RPM better than Deb, although Apt was super cool. And I wish. That, that RPM had a version, something like apt, which did come later. And which was Seth Vidal's work initially with yum. And but, but I felt like there was this whole part of the ecosystem that was missing, which is this community around the Linux distribution.

And so chaos Linux was, was designed to, to, to be that. And we were, we were. We were, we had, we started growing in this community, kept growing. It started off meeting and if anybody knows Berkeley started off meeting in Berkeley at a cool little pizza beer joint called Jupiter. And we always used to hang out at Jupiter and that's where, that's where all this started.

And from there again, community kept growing, moved to IRC for most things, and it kept going from there. And over time you know, the community was, was quite substantial. We had a number of people that were contributing in and being part of this. And then, then Red Hat changed their business model and they got rid of something called Red Hat Linux.

Now Red Hat Linux up until this point was the free version. It was, it was their we'll call it community version of, of Red Hat. And and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was just kind of getting spun up. So Red Hat Enterprise Linux was, Oh, here's what you go pay for. If you want commercial, you know, enterprise grade solution, support, et cetera, but the free solution Red Hat Linux is just got end of life and one of the things about chaos Linux that we were trying to do was trying to maintain core operating system compatibility.

And so we're like, well, we want the core APIs to be compatible with Red Hat. So a lot, there was a, it was a shared. Common base of, of, of, with, with Red Hat. So we kind of needed that, that Red Hat base. And there were a few people on the team that were like, you know, this is, this is not good, but we can still get access to those source RPMs.

So we can still get our, our, our base and then extend, extend the operating system from there. At about this point, white box enterprise Linux came, came about. And the, the maintainer of it, I believe his name is John, was John Morris. Don't quote me on that if I got that wrong, John, sorry. , but he put it out there and he, he told me in an email thread direct to him that, you know, he didn't really want to maintain, you know, a whole operating system himself.

So I asked if we should work together and he said, no, he says, if this is something you're interested in, go, go ahead and do it. And CentOS was kind of born from that. The first developer on it was a guy named Rocky McGaugh and Rocky was super passionate about open source. He loved open source and he also came from an HBC background.

So him and I, you know, we got along really, really well, really well. And it was a fantastic, you know, kind of initial drive. He worked for a company, an HPC company that had their own rebuild of Red Hat already. And so he was, he already knew how to do it. We had a couple other people on the team that were just tremendous, fantastic engineers.

Michael Jennings is another one of these these engineers. And he also, he ran VA's Linux distribution, which again was a rebuild of, of, of Red Hat. So we had a number of people on the team who knew exactly how to do this. We had build resources already. So. When, you know, white box kind of, you know, hit the market and then john mentioned, you didn't want to do this.

We're like, well. Let's just throw all the source RPMs through our build system and we'll just, you know, we'll, we'll end up with something that's more community base than white box, but, you know, and maybe something can go bigger and CentOS was born Lance Davis came up with the name. And brought it to me and I thought the name was great.

A little bit of humor and irony. I said, I actually, I don't like the OS being separate than sent. I said, cause sent is cheap, but it's infinite increase from zero. So I said, is great sent to OS and I don't like that, but sent us is great. And of course, you know, we put it towards the community and the community ended up liking the logos and liking it as CentOS.

So whatever.

Jonathan: Oh, that's, that's fun. That's a, that's a, that's a lot of neat history about how we got to CentOS and You know, I, I was around for a little bit of that. My first Linux install was like one of the real early Fedoras, Fedora 3 or 4. So I came onto the scene a little bit after all of this happened but I, I found CentOS and, you know, started installing it on some of my machines and on some customer machines too, and I, so I was, I was around for that blog post we talked about before the show that was in 2020. So it's not been that terribly long ago, but you know, Red Hat had put out, CentOS 7 was out, CentOS 8 was out, and I thought CentOS 8 was just the coolest thing. So I started installing it on machines, on servers.

I had it, I had it deployed. And then Red Hat puts this blog post out and they say, we're not going to continue. Well, okay, so there's, there's a, there's a missing step here, right? How did we go from So Red Hat put out this statement that they're not going to continue doing CentOS. How did we get from the point where you and some other open source developers were doing rebuilds of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux completely unofficially to Red Hat now has the ability to put the brakes on the project.

I think that's, that's an important step that we almost missed there. What happened?

Gregory: There was, there was, there was ChaosLinux which, which had a similar base as, as CentOS and that was the overlap. And then there was CentOS, which kind of had a. Slightly different trajectory. To be clear, my passion was always on, you know, making something new initially.

Like I wanted to do chaos, like chaos Linux to me was the coolest thing. And while even though people out there wanted CentOS more, I thought. You know, I thought it was more fun. I thought it was more interesting to be developing something new from that perspective. So I was really more focused on the chaos Linux project.

I did lead both projects as part of the chaos foundation for a few years. And there was a, there was some history that I'm not going to go into. But it was decided at some point, you know, we came to a mutual agreement that the project should. Should go into separate directions. And so Sentos ended up going in one direction.

Chaos Linux kept going in, in another direction. Chaos Linux stayed alive for a number of years after that. But a lot of the interest kind of died out because when the, the split occurred excuse me, Sentos kind of took all of the fame and glory, even for good reason, like that was what everybody wanted.

And so Chaos Linux kind of slowly started dwindling out. And the way that, and, and this. This is going to come across as a criticism and I don't mean it to just in terms of matter of fact, the way that CentOS was initially kind of instantiated by no fault of anybody's just because the technology wasn't there we had individuals who, who had the signing keys.

We had build hosts, which in some cases were individual people's homes in their garages, in, in hosting facilities, and we did anything we could. We built the packages anywhere we could, but as a result of that, it's really hard to bring in external people. And, and make them part of this community because there's, there's, you can't just like hand over the signing keys, which are the keys to the kingdom for the operating system to somebody who hasn't really been there for a while.

And, and it's hard to kind of open up that, that envelope of trust. And so. We, we, we, early on, it was a kind of small team and that team persisted. Now there was a little bit of growth in the team and a little, you know, some people, some people joined but for the most part, it was always a very small team that maintained it.

As you can probably imagine with, especially with a small team, after 10 years of doing this, a number of those engineers, well. You know, I have, I have my day jobs I've been spending a lot of time on this and weekends and evenings and off hours and. This is kind of hard to, you know, have a life and whatnot.

So things started to slow down and a lot of people probably do remember that pre 2014, CentOS was actually starting to, to, to slow down. Like it took in some cases, three, four months. For new major releases to come out. And then sometimes even a couple months for point releases to

Jonathan: come out.

Gregory: And as a result of that, like things were just kind of slowing down and slowing down.

So at some point Red Hat made offers, job offers. To a lot of the Santos maintainers that we're still doing this. I was not privy to these discussions. I don't know exactly what happened, but what you can see from the outside is, you know, number of these engineers and whatnot got employment from red hat and the project moved from the community to red hat.

I I was very optimistic, honestly, when this first happened, I was very hopeful because I actually felt as though Red Hat is the right home for, for this initially, for a long time, actually, I thought that I even proposed to the Red Hat people that I knew, and I think it went up the executive chain at least a little bit.

At the time that I actually wanted to hand over CentOS to Red Hat back when I was still running the project and I wanted to offer it to them. They said no, they didn't want it. Now granted that was 12 years, 10 or 12 years prior to them kind of acquiring the project. But they ended up acquiring it.

And that was in 2014, if I remember correctly. And in 2019. IBM acquired Red Hat, and then in 2020, CentOS, we got this announcement. And, and that's where we merged back up to what you were mentioning just a moment ago.

Jonathan: Yes. Yes. Okay. So, the, we, we get the announcement. Let's, let's continue on from there.

We get the announcement, and those of us that had trusted in CentOS, we, we sort of got burned. Now, if we were on CentOS 7, everything was fine. Because that was going to end of life when the end of life was supposed to be. But for CentOS 8, we got basically a year, not even a full year. I think it was several months, like nine months.

It's like, Oh, we're going to end, we're going to end of life this in nine months. And it was. In fact, my wife watches the show and she made a comment. She says, I remember the reaction in the house to all of that. It was a significant event for a lot of us. And on that blog post from Red Hat where they made this announcement, you came along and you made, you made a comment.

And I don't remember where it got picked up. It may have, it may have gotten picked up on Slashdot, or maybe it didn't. Maybe we were just all going to the blog post, and you, it may be that we were all going to the blog post and going down to the comments and going, Surely somebody down here has an idea for what we can do.

And there was. There was somebody down in the comments that had an idea for what we could do. What, what Let's see. What possessed you to make the an offer like that? And what was the offer? How did, how did that turn out?

Gregory: Well so the company that I have is named CIQ. And the goal of CIQ is to build a computing platform.

And we were heads down building this computing platform. And we, we recognize that the computing platform is super complicated. It's actually, especially at the beginning. There's a lot of moving pieces to, to, to this computing platform. It's built off of Kubernetes. It's a whole HPC type and AI and ML computing platform that is different than anything else that has existed.

So it's just super complicated. That's the point. I'm not trying to plug what it is that we were doing, but just super complicated. So when we thought about going to market. With this, we recognize that we're going to have to create an entire turnkey stack and support that entire terms, key stack. And obviously we're like, Centos is the right solution.

And we showed it to some vendors and some partners. And we actually even had a few vendors and partners ask us if we would do this on Ubuntu. And our response was, well. You know, the, we felt as though that the best and safest solution was, was CentOS. And so we were moving forward with basing this whole computing stack on CentOS.

Well, when we got this announcement, it kind of made us put our foot in our mouth a little bit, as you can probably imagine. So we, we, we, we had to figure out. In kind of short order, what are we going to do? Cause this affects us. It affects our go to market. It affects our customers and partners that we've already been talking to.

And to be honest, it affects the whole community, like everybody. And so I had some quick discussions with, with some of my stakeholders at the company. And I said, look, I may need to be part of a project or help to, to, to bring this back because this is a really big piece of the ecosystem and.

Everybody needs this. And so I'm like, I'm going to go raise my hand to the community and say, if anybody wants to do this, you know, I'm going to be hanging over in the Slack. And this Slack just blew up. Like, I don't even know who ended up reposting this. I couldn't keep up with anything at the time.

As a matter of fact, I got some people that, that even got upset at me because I didn't get back to them because in this Slack, the free tier of Slack. Supports 10, 000 messages and it's rolling buffer. If you've got 10, 000 plus people in a slack that all just joined, everybody's talking. I had pages of DMS.

I would just scroll and scroll and scroll. When I wake up in the morning, go to the bottom one and just see, Oh, you can't see this message because it's past 10, 000. Go to the next one. You can't see this message past 10, 000. And it's not until I get halfway up to the list where I'm basically just kind of catching up to what I can even see.

And then I start responding to people now. This was a really interesting situation because going from zero to 10, 000 people, and I'm not joking, it really was over 10, 000 people all talking at the same time, all excited about going and recreating and rebuilding Santos and managing anything with 10, 000 people who just all showed up like without any management hierarchy, no like structure, Oh, my gosh, I, that was, that was crazy.

So first thing that I did was I created a bunch of different channels and I said, everybody go to, go to the channels in which interest you the most. And so we had people kind of break themselves out into different channels and kind of trickle trickle into different channels. And then each one of these channels kind of had different groups or different initiatives, excuse me.

And these initiatives ranged from everything from. Okay, let's start mapping out what packages we need. Where are we going to get these packages? How are we going to build these packages? What are the build orders for these packages? Are all of the dependencies present? If not, what dependencies do we have to go?

So it was that from what infrastructure do we need? To build this. How are we going to manage that infrastructure? How are we going to make sure we don't succumb to the same issues that sent early sent us did where there just wasn't the capability to even bring in new people from the community. So how are we going to manage that?

How are we going to manage the project as a whole? Like, is there a, you know, like, like a leadership umbrella of this? And then we had people that came along that says we know nothing about how to build a Linux operating system, but We want to be part. And so we had documentation teams, all of a sudden joining up.

We had a design team who was like, you know, we're artists. Like we want to make stuff. We want to make stuff pretty web team. That's like, yeah, we want to make a website. It's actually funny, we had swag and merchandise before having a product before having an out, like an output, because the design team is like, we can do that.

Like, we're not going to build an operating system, but we can go build, we can go build shirts, right? We can go make this, we can go do something over here. And and they did that. And so. Next thing you know is we have these, these cool rocky swags and shirts and stickers. And the first ones actually said Rocky Lennox on the shirt and underneath and bracketed text, early supporters.

And they're there. I don't even know if they're possible to get anymore, but I always have people asking me like, can we get an early supporter shirt? It's like, it's not really an early supporter anymore, but I'll see if I can pick some

Jonathan: up.

Gregory: It's been, it's been remarkable and, and the team just continued to grow.

Now I want to stress something really important here, which is my knowledge in terms of how to build an open source community is, is, is relevant, my knowledge of how to build an operating system is 20 years dated. Like I haven't built an operating system for 20 years at this point, when these teams started coming together.

They immediately outstrip my knowledge of how to actually do this using today's technology, today's capabilities, today's security practices, et cetera. So I'm watching these teams grow and I'm like, Hey, how do I help be? How do I not get in the way? And how do I just keep everybody in online? And, and that was really my first kind of goal was just to help build this, this community and, and help build partners and, and, and other people who want to be part of this.

And, and. C. I. Q. Again, kind of, as I mentioned at the beginning was here to help. C. I. Q. Obviously funded me. We ended up just like I said in the comments of the blog post that we will hire some people to go do this and to go focus on this. And we did. And we do have people that are hired by C. I. Q. In order to kind of help this community grow and thrive.

And C. I. Q. Does not own or control or, or hold hostage this community. Like this community makes its own decisions of what's best for the community. And as a result, this community kept growing and thriving and others started wanting, wanting to join and be part of this all of the hyperscalers jumped on various vendors, ISVs, IHVs joined up, joined on and, and all these people wanted to be part of this and it was just beautiful how the whole thing kind of, kind of came up to be and I take credit.

Really for just bringing people together and, and really just kind of having division of here's how we need to do this at a high level. But I want to stress like the people that came together, the teams that came together are some of the best people in the industry. And Rocky Linux has been amazing.

We built everything from scratch. Literally we wouldn't release versions of the operating system unless we knew for a fact that others could also build

Jonathan: it.

Gregory: So we've always adhered 100 percent to open source principles. And, and everything we've done has been by the community. And I really want to stress that.

And that's why I wanted to go back when you first mentioned the cross pollination between CIQ and Rocky. Because I don't want Like, I want to make like this, this, this confusion actually happens all the time. And we are trying our best both on the CIQ side as well as on the Rocky side to clarify this.

But and, and, and I would love advice if anybody has, like, we're trying to do this now. CIQ definitely is very proud of, of what CIQ has helped to create. And so sometimes we message, you know, and say things like, you know, the Rocky community is doing fantastic and whatnot. And so people may assume that there's a, there's a more of a direct correlation than, than exists.

But they are two separate entities and CIQ is just here to make sure that that open source community continues to grow, thrive and has whatever it needs to be successful. And, and there are. Commercial needs that that people have. So a lot of people say we need support. We need optimizations.

We need modifications. We need X, Y, or Z and C. I. Q. does help in a lot of those areas. So when a corporate entity is needed, C. I. Q. raises our hand. We say we're here. We're here to help in any way we can. But you don't need us like go use the operating system without us. Like we can never, we're never want to hold it back.

So, but if you do need us, we want to win business based on us just trying to be good, good, good contributors and good partners with the open source community. And so we, we try to do very good ethical business on, on that front. But again, the community has grown and maybe I've talked enough. I've talked plenty.

So probably where Krista starts to come into the,

Jonathan: into the. I was thinking about that. And so the organization that is not CIQ, that sort of is the host for Rocky Linux then, is RESF. And I think this is a perfect time to kick it over to Krista and ask what, what is RESF and what is it all about?

Krista: Thank you. Hi. The RESF is the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. And the whole point of its existence is to probably to inspire both individuals and corporations to be able to come together in support of a common goal, which is that of preserving the the longevity and the stewardship and also of enterprise type software and also of helping to.

Drive innovation in that, in that piece of open source.

Jonathan: And so what, what's your, what's your backstory, Krista? How did you get involved in all of this? Were, were you one of the early adopters that saw the blog posts and just couldn't, couldn't get away from it? Or, you know, where, where does, where do those threads tie in?

Krista: You know, I, I traveled my own path. I, I kind of stumbled into the Rocky Linux project. In retrospect, I feel like it was the beginning of chapter two of, of Rocky's birth and getting going because they had worked so hard to just get the product up and get stable with that. And I think they were starting to realize, Oh, we need to pay attention to the community part of this open source community, technical community.

And in doing that, I. I didn't even know what was coming. I had just in my own world had been trying to develop my skills in technical writing, and I knew that open source documentation was a way to do that. So I joined this new project. I knew somebody who was involved with it and they pointed out that with open source documentation, anybody can be contributing to it, but also.

So it's a new project. So this is a great time to be involved because we're in the process of creating a whole lot of documentation. Unlike some projects that may be 20 years old by now are a little more less, I don't know, volatile. That's the wrong word. But they're not changing as much.

Jonathan: Sure.

Krista: So I just came in to.

Develop my technical writing chops. And after a few months of that, somebody reached out and said, Hey, did you have any interest, would you have any interest in participating in the community? And I said, well, what's involved? And they said, well, we have a couple of social media accounts and sometimes we go to events.

So I said, okay, yeah, I could do that. I don't have a job right now.

Jonathan: It works out nicely.

Krista: Yeah, time to do that. And it very quickly turned into something much bigger than that. Because I, it was right as the original board was forming, as far as the oversight committees, they had just really gotten the RESF formalized and ready to be inhabited.

So I got to be a part of voting in the first board, which was the very first thing I did as an official Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation member. So, I, I was, I, Think of myself as the first one who joined after the beginning, which is what makes me part of the beginning of chapter two.

Jonathan: Yeah, that makes sense.

And so what what does the community itself look like these days? If you were to if you were to give someone a quick primer on tell me about the community involved with rocky linux What does what does it look like?

Krista: Well I have attended a lot of events, and in so doing, I've had to learn how to articulate the project, and it helped us all to acknowledge and realize we have really two separate sides of the project that we like to think everybody all works together as a whole, and we're all pretty unique.

I feel like we regard ourselves pretty laterally. It's not a lot of hierarchy, but it's a team of leaders that each has their eyes on a different part of the project. And we realized that there's a side that's more technical, such as the release engineering and the testing team and yeah, the infrastructure side.

And then there's the side that is more non code based, but also important and valuable, which is the design team, the web team, the documentation in the community. Itself. And so I've, my eyes are pretty much on the community side and on those non technical or it's not non technical, but it's non code on that non code side that.

I try to include everybody to communicate with everybody. It just, I came in and started talking to people and tried to create points of connection because I knew I may not know open source that well, and I may not know all of this technical code stuff, but I know people and I know that when people feel connected to a thing, they come back, they hang around.

And they, and when you give them ownership of a thing, they get involved. And then they also, when they have ownership, then they enter and pass on that enthusiasm. So I, I would say that our community now is something that's more engaged and is also there and feeling like this is a thing that's fun.

And this is our, our social. Our social group.

Jonathan: So one of the things that we often ask about it kind of at this point in the show is like, who sets the roadmap? And the idea there is we kind of, we're kind of asking like, is the project community driven versus top down driven? And that's sort of an, maybe a category error question here.

Because in some ways, Red Hat sets the roadmap, right? Because since the Rocky Linux is a repackaging of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so I'm just curious, like how much roadmap is there? How much wiggle room do you guys take for yourselves?

Krista: Well, I think I'll answer from my perspective. And then maybe Greg has more to say, but I know that our group looks ahead.

As much as they can as far as they can and tries to be prepared for the changes that come the new releases of red hat of rel Don't come in a vacuum. They come out of incubation and out of testing from other projects the fedora and what's now centos stream Which is what the centos project became which we haven't really addressed yet It didn't just go away.

It became a new thing and it is now upstream And It is still generating what is today that we know as Enterprise Linux, so got lost on the question, but they're looking at the people in our group in Rocky Linux are looking upstream to see what changes are coming and already putting together test versions of future releases just to make sure that they're prepared.

I know that the primary function and the primary purpose of Rocky Linux is to exist in the space that it exists in, and to meet the needs of the demographic that has flocked to it for those reasons.

Jonathan: Greg, some questions?

Krista: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Well, as far as the community goes our Purpose of existing now is to just continue as far as our roadmap is to look down the road at what can help us be successful long term at supporting the community.

So, you know, we try to make sure that we have support from a diversity of sources. We try to make sure that we have everything documented so that to insulate ourselves in case somebody has to go away, then there's somebody else can come in and take over their role or. Solve the problems that have been solved.

And so we set a roadmap in that way of trying to just articulate what we are and where we want to go.

Jonathan: Very good. Okay. So same question, but this is good to go. I'm sure a very different direction because we're going to go to Greg and talk about roadmap. And I'm again, it seems that. There, there's maybe not a lot of wiggle room.

And, and at some point we're gonna have to make comparisons between Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. Right? They're, they're the, they're the other big player sort of in this space outside of, of red Hat. And so, you know what, we'll, we'll dive more into this, and I know, again, I know part of the answer here, but like, what, what does your roadmap look like and how much is that set by upstream?

Red Hat?

Gregory: A lot of the ups of the roadmap, of course, is set by upstream Red Hat.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Gregory: When, when we started this, the whole point was to continue where CentOS has left off and and, and I want to actually go back to Chris's point CentOS Linux has left off because CentOS stream does exist and that's what CentOS has become, which is now in front of Red Hat.

So I'll differentiate that more pedantically and usually I'm pretty lax about that, but I will be more pedantic. So CentOS Linux left off. And Rocky was, was there to take its place in a matter of speaking and to become the successor of CentOS Linux. Now, to do that means that we have a a set of goals that we need to adhere to, which originally CentOS adhered, CentOS Linux adhered to.

And, and we are, our mission, our vision for the product is how do we Continue with with exactly where that left off. So when we think of road map, a lot of it is how do we ensure that we can always do this? And how do we ensure that we can always, you know, fulfill the promise that we made to the community that we set out to do at least to the best of our.

And we've seen some some difficulties. There's been some, some changes with regards to access to source code just as an example. And, uh, Rocky and R. E. S. F. said, you know, we're going to stick to our guns. We're going to stick to the promise that we made because we don't want to change, make any changes to all of the people that have, that are, that are running Rocky Linux.

They entrusted us with their infrastructure. So we're going to continue with exactly with what we said we're going to do and what we set out to do until the point where if it ever comes that we cannot. And so that's our goal. That's our mission. That's our strategy. And to some extent, that's our road map.

But then the road map becomes A little bit more strategic. How do we ensure that we can continue to do this? So when source code kind of dried up a little bit and it became more difficult to get access to the source code Rocky came up with a number of different ways to do this and to continue building the operating system.

But at the same token. You know, I'm I'm all I've been burnt with with failed missions many times in the past. So I'm always thinking about contingencies. And what do we what do we do for contingency planning? And how do we ensure that everything that we're doing is going to be able to continue moving forward?

So I reached out to Oracle and I reached out to Sousa and I said, look, we're kind of all in the same sort of, sort of boat. Like, how do we all ensure that the source code for Enterprise Linux always remains open and, and we all can get it, we all can leverage it. And Oracle said, yeah, this is something we would love to be part of.

And Sousa said, we'd love to be part of this. And an open ELA was created. Now, to be clear. Rocky already had a solution for moving forward. So Rocky is continuing to use that solution. So nothing has changed on the Rocky side, but the fact that now open ELA exists provides a contingency plan for Rocky and, and ensures that Rocky will always exist and we'll always be able to continue moving forward.

And, and that is backed by not only CIQ, but Oracle and SUSE. We actually. Are opening up membership that's actually becoming a 5 0 1 C six nonprofit. And we're opening up membership right now and we actually have I believe it's two other organizations who are proposing membership right now and, and looking to do that.

So this, the open ELA is, is also growing and that's going to provide greater stability. And when I'm jokingly jokingly going to call the land of enterprise Linux, which is this pseudo standard of what does it mean to create an operating system that is compatible with other operating systems, which makes life better for system administrators for end users for IHVs, ISVs, other partners as well.

Everybody really wants compatibility across the spectrum. So we have this pseudo standard. Which is today to follow red hats lead. But again, this whole thing is about making sure we have contingencies and making sure that we are properly set up that no matter what fluctuates within corporate agendas, that Rocky Linux can continue.

And that we can continue doing exactly what we set out to do. Now you brought up Alma. I'll address this initially. Krista may have some thoughts on this as well. When, when the source code kind of became more difficult to, to obtain Alma Linux took a different, a different trajectory, slightly different trajectory.

Their trajectory was, well, we don't have to be exactly one to one compatible. We can be close, but not exact. And they de risked Alma Linux. In the sense that doesn't have to be exact. It just needs to be close. And they've done a very good job at keeping it close. And they've done a really good job also on adding additional features and capabilities that, that people want that red hat doesn't do

Jonathan: backporting, backporting some pretty important security fixes earlier than red hat does.

That's one of them. Yeah, yes, exactly.

Gregory: So. There is some, some, there's a great opportunity now for Alma. There's a great opportunity for Rocky Linux. And the most important thing that now we have in this ecosystem of Enterprise Linux is choice. And now we have, so Oracle Linux also is not identical. It's really dang close, but it's not identical.

And so, but we now have choice and people can choose what operating system fits their needs and requirements best. And this is, but, but we still have compatibility, which is exactly kind of where we need to be again to solve problems for users to solve problems for our partners and, and vendors like.

We need that compatibility. Otherwise, we end up with Linux distributions that aren't compatible with each other. And while there's there could be some benefit to that in the sense that, you know, people could do different things with their Linux distributions when you're talking about professional I. T.

Staff, whether it's their jobs to maintain. A fairly significantly, you know, large infrastructure and they don't want surprises. They want to sleep at night. They want to know everything's exactly the same, right? And so they want that like boringness, super boringness. And some Linux distributions are going to be bleeding edge.

They're going to be moving faster. They're going to be focused on different areas. In enterprise Linux, it's really, it's hate to put it this way, but it's kind of about the boring and, and how do we. Help system administrators and I. T. Professionals and partners and whatnot bring value and maintain their infrastructure in a way that, you know, helps them sleep at night.

Jonathan: So I, I commented at the time when both Rocky and all the Linux both were announced to became things. There were some people that went, well, why do we need two of these? And I, at the time said, well, this is, these are going to be run by different people. At some point, there's going to be different decisions made.

And I thought from the very beginning that it was a great thing to have both projects in the space. It, from one perspective, sort of as an insurance policy, but from the other perspective also just because they are eventually going to go in slightly different directions and they're going to meet different needs.

So I, I am, and I've said this publicly, I am thrilled that both Rocky Linux and Alma Linux exist. And I think they're both super important. I was

Gregory: on a, I was on a podcast with, with Igor who was the original founder of, of Alma Linux with, you know, with cloud Linux. And I was on a podcast with him and somebody asked us at some point you know, should we, shouldn't we just join forces?

And there's definitely, there's some there's some good reasons to join forces, but both Igor and I agreed at the time that, you know, really what the community needs, especially after one whole operating system was just end of life. Unilaterally for the most part, right? Really what everybody needs is they, they, they need to know that there's multiple solutions out there.

They need to know that they have safety in numbers speaking. And it was, it's very good that there are multiple solutions out there. And it's even better that we're all compatible. Yeah. That's the key in my mind. The moment that somebody. has to deal with an incompatibility between operating systems, between infrastructure tooling or whatever that actually makes life harder on people.

Having standards actually makes life better, makes life easier. So even though right now it's a pseudo standard this is something that we, we do have kind of like a goal. We, we have this, this golden image of what we're trying to, to emulate. And I think I think Rocky, I think Oracle, I think Sousa Liberty and, and others out there are doing a fantastic job maintaining that compatibility.

And this is this is, by the way, Open ELA does more than just distribute the source code and ensure that it's always available. Open ELA is also now talking about, well, how do we help guarantee compatibility across all of these different variants? And how do we demonstrate compatibility across all these different variants, such that we encourage variants to some extent.

And at the same token, we're also encouraging stability and compatibility between those variants. Because again, at the, for the end of the, at the end of the day. For for end users, for the people that are using this, the people that are relying on this, their safety in numbers. So let's make sure that we've got backup plans, we've got contingencies and and everybody knows that the enterprise Linux ecosystem is, as a result, the most stable ecosystem in Linux, that you can go and run any of these operating systems and end up in a great

Jonathan: place.

Have there been conversations with AlmaLinux about joining OpenELA?

Gregory: I have not I can't say if there have been other conversations about it. I know that there have been questions that just, again, not with the open, it was not, excuse me, not with the Alma people and team, but just questions on, you know, where are they going to end up getting source code once, once CentOS stream end of life, because they're only, you know, CentOS stream is only alive for five years.

So, where are they going to end up getting updates from and whatnot? And I, I make the the, the, the, the invitation that OpenELA, OpenELA is there. Like, if they want to use OpenELA, absolutely. We would love it. And we, we think that that would be terrific.

Jonathan: Yeah. It, it, it, it, it occurs to people, it occurs to me, like you guys are doing similar things.

It just, there's an obvious, there's obvious room for collaboration, even if, you know, as we, as we said, it, it doesn't make sense to try to merge the projects, right? We don't want that, but there's all kinds of room for collaboration between the two and with, and with the others in the space. So that's that's a question you'll probably get as long as there are both projects out there.

Alright, so let's, one other thing I wanted to touch on, and maybe this is just going to be commentary for me, although I'm sure you'll have something, you'll have something to add to it Red Hat, Red Hat, do not, for those of you listening do not think that we are bashing on Red Hat do not think that Red Hat are the bad guys, Particularly the Red Hat engineers that are actually doing the work.

There are some excellent engineers. There are some really good people. We, well, I, I guess I shouldn't, well, no, I'll say, I'll say we, because I do as well. We have a difference of opinion on what we think of their business model and particularly the fact that they ended of life. The CentOS, when there were some commitments already out in the wild to not do so.

But, don't, don't don't go harass your local Red Hat employee. Have you seen, have you seen some of that? I've seen, I've seen a few threads. From people at Red Hat like please don't it's it's not our fault. There's more to the story. You know, what have you there were different threads about it I'm sure that's been on your radar, too

Gregory: so You bring up something that actually I think is super important for us to address and and again I think Krista may have some thoughts on this but You know, a lot of people have their sports teams and they're super excited about their sports teams.

Like I've seen fights emerge. I used to love to go to hockey games and Oh my goodness. The fights in the stands and whatnot. Like, yes, like people have their religions associated with things that they love and the tech industry especially the Linux industry and, and, and community. We've got a lot of our own religions, no matter of speaking.

Sure. And. Whether it's what editor you're using, what programming language you're using, what IDE or or Linux distribution or window manager. Like we all have like, like passion on what it is that we, we are excited about. And, and we kind of defend those like, like other people would defend their sports teams in many cases.

Yes. My point is. There's a lot of passion. There's a lot of excitement, and there's a lot of emotion that has occurred over the last few years. There's been a lot of emotion both you know, around Red Hat, around Rocky, around Alma. Around all of this. A lot of times, you know, this, this, these, this unfolds in different ways.

But I, I'm glad to say that at this point, I think most of that drama and that, that, that. Rockiness, not to use that pun in, in purposely, but has actually kind of gone by at this point and I don't see very much of it anymore, which I'm really thankful for I've made mistakes. Other people, I think I'm not going to call anyone out, but I think there's been a lot of mistakes made.

In terms of how we allowed Our emotion and our personal feelings and whatnot to get involved with this. And the good news is I think we are in a fundamentally better place from an enterprise Linux perspective than we ever have been before, meaning even when CentOS was separate from Red Hat.

It was still, except for the very beginning, we actually had multiple different types of versions of CentOS, there was Tau Linux, and there was Whitebox, and there was others, but it all kind of merged into CentOS, which now meant there was one kind of operating system, and we saw how that kind of ground down, just slowed down for a while and whatnot, um, but there was just, just really one.

I believe we're actually in a fundamentally better place, and I know we had to go through some drama, and we had to go through some emotions to get to this place, but I think we're in a great place right now, and I think it's good for, to be honest, I think it's good for Red Hat I think it's good for the users, I think it's good for vendors.

I think it's good for everybody. So I fundamentally believe we're in a better place. Krista, did you have any thoughts? I wanted to kind of poke and yes, I wanted, I wanted to ask

Jonathan: Krista too, because she, she works as the community manager and a lot of times the community manager is the frontline on dealing with.

Some of those passions in the community, is that something that you see?

Krista: I think it has diminished a lot since I first started working with the project. What we've tried to frame it as, and to ourselves as much as externally sometimes is to remind ourselves and to remind anybody who wants to say, why not, why don't you guys.

Fighting like you're in a hockey match is the enterprise Linux is really a neighborhood. It is its own little branch of Linux of the greater world of Linux, and I think it helps the entire enterprise Linux ecosystem. If we work together and consider ourselves co laborers instead of enemies within, because nobody's going to say, I'm going to go to Rocky versus Alma.

They're going to say, Oh, there's too much drama here. I'm going to Debian, which, you know, Debian is its own thing, but for people for whom Enterprise Linux is a good solution. It's best for us to all work together for the good of Enterprise Linux in general in order to continue to allow that whole platform to move forward to that end.

What we've done is we support the. The Fedora and CentOS stream is we consider that our upstream and so we actually contribute financially to their gathering conferences and we go and attend and participate together and all the Linux people are there and we all sort of just mingle together and we are at least friendly to each other.

Jonathan: Well, that's, that's good. That's better than any of the alternatives,

Krista: right? I mean, you might as well be able to get along with the people that you're at events with.

Jonathan: Yes. Yes. Okay. So what, we talked a little bit about roadmap and sort of a theoretical idea, but is there, is there anything sort of on the horizon that you guys know is coming that you want to plug and any, any any big plans to announce?

Gregory: 10 is coming. Risk five is coming. So those are, those are the big pieces of, of what we're excited about. I can also share that for our users that are leveraging you know, government compliance needs and whatnot. FIPS is finally on its way. Now we've been pushing on FIPS. So CIQ has funded the FIPS development.

For Rocky for quite some time we promised to the user base that we would start with eight version eight. And the problem is, is that, and not to get too far in the compliance world, but FIPS is is really hard. Like there's a lot. Of difficulty with managing and navigating the whole FIPS ecosystem and process and couple that with 140 2 just end of life as, as this whole thing was spinning up and 140 3 is the new standard for FIPS operating system module compliance.

And. Version 8 was never built for 140 3, it was built for 140 2. And so CIQ, it took us a long time and a ton of development to actually get version 8, 140 3 compliant. And as of right now, all of the modules are in MIP status. And they are available and CIQ is making all of that available back to the community as well.

For,

Jonathan: so for someone that heard, for someone that heard FIPS and is thinking of Simon FIPS, what, what is FIPS compliance? So FIPS is

Gregory: a compliance that guarantees. The cryptography is running properly within the operating system and it is meeting the government standards defined by one 40 dash three. So there's a whole bunch of cryptography that occurs within the operating system and occurs within applications.

What this is stating is that there are various components of the operating system that are providing cryptography. And each one of those is, is functioning, functioning and certified. That it is, it is working properly and it is validated approved by the government. So it's taken some time to get to that point.

Anybody who has to deal with federal compliance is, is dealing with FIPS and it is a big deal. And, and this is why you know, it, it has been a. Many multi million dollar investment from C. I. Q. to do this. And so that's gonna be released here shortly. As well. So we're going to see FIPS. And again, just to reiterate, version 10 is coming.

I believe the, the guesses of, of when that's going to come out is in summer. And we are, we have been working on RISC V for quite some time. So RISC V is also on its way.

Jonathan: Yeah, interesting. I am, I am personally, I'm fairly excited about RISC V as a thing as it moves into the Linux ecosystem. I'm, I'm looking forward to some even better hardware.

being available for some less ridiculous prices. There's, there's some good out there, but I feel like we're, we're ready for the next really good one to come out. All right, let's see. So is there, is there any talk within, within either CIQ or Rocky about doing something like a repackage of CentOS stream or repackage of Fedora or anything crazy like that?

Or does that just not make any sense to you guys?

Gregory: From my perspective, I haven't heard much rumblings at all through the community on that. I know that there's a lot of our community members, even our developers, that run and leverage Fedora, you know, quite a bit. Fedora is a fantastic collaborative operating system, and it has definitely been extraordinarily valuable.

Uh, area of the enterprise Linux ecosystem, but it is kind of the bleeding edge area of the enterprise

Jonathan: Linux

Gregory: ecosystem. On the Fentos stream side, this is a little bit more where you know, I don't want to put words in Alma's you know, you know, from their perspective, but it's a little bit more.

We're almost kind of focusing right

Jonathan: now.

Gregory: So almost a little bit more on the, on the central stream side and then guaranteeing, going back, guaranteeing that compatibility and then adding some additional value, which again, totally fantastic. I love that they're doing that from the Rocky perspective.

We're really just focused on being that. The successor of CentOS and to continue moving forward just to make sure that everybody has a very clear understanding of what CentOS was, CentOS Linux, excuse me, what CentOS Linux was, and now what Rocky is.

Jonathan: Do you guys still have a line of communication with?

Like the redhead engineers. So, and the reason I asked this is because I know that you like all of the rest of us, when you spend much time with an operating system, you find, you find problems, you find bugs, and you guys are in an interesting position to find those. Figure out the fixes and, you know, maybe get them pushed upstream.

You're also, because of the bug for bug compatibility, you're in an interesting place where you may know what the fix is, but you don't want to roll that fix out until Red Hat does. So is there, and I'm sure there must be some work where you're trying to push things back upstream to Red Hat. Please fix this.

Please pull this patch into your sources. What does that process look like?

Gregory: So our release engineering team has actually had a number of tickets in with, with Red Hat to, to either fix certain things or to provide feedback on certain things. I can tell you it is a, it is a difficult situation that and I'll say this kind of bluntly.

And again, I don't mean it in a negative way. But all of the enterprise Linux ecosystem, it's following the lead of Red Hat. And so as a result of that, it is not really community and collaborative. Yes. There's some opportunity to provide some collaboration back into Red Hat, but it is not really an open collaborative community.

So it makes it difficult for us. I would love to invite Red Hat to, be more open with that. But I'm not complaining. I think what we have right now is, I think, fantastic. And I think we're working through it in a very good way. With that being said this is, this is also provided difficulty and again, this is, this is not about plugging C.

I. Q. but to kind of talk about a difficulty is we have customer contracts where we are providing additional value. On top of what currently exists. In some cases, that's optimization. In some cases, that's hardening. In some cases, that's performance tuning et cetera. And some, there are some times in which we, CIQ decides, well, we need to go fix a, a security bug that Red Hat has decided that they, they don't want to fix.

Or something just happened recently, and I can get you the details. I don't have them off the top of my head. Where CIQ actually just pushed back on the CVE and we just got a CVE unvalidated, meaning it's not truly a CVE. So that's quite the process to do too. Yeah. Yeah. So we did that and that affected Red Hat in a positive way as well.

Cause Red Hat wasn't fixing it. So we actually got that CVE Nixed. So, oh, Nix is an operating system. Linux variant, so I shouldn't use that. A very cool one, by the way, I may add. So we're talking about kind of value add operating systems. Nix is super cool.

Jonathan: Oh yeah, there's some clever ones out there.

Gregory: So it has been, it has been a little bit of a challenge for, for CIQ. We have additional repositories for our customers that when we fix things that are either not fixed upstream yet and whatnot we fix it there. And in cases where we can, we do, we do push it back up to the, to the upstream communities.

In some cases that could be Red Hat Fedora. In some cases it was Stream. Some cases it's the, it's the upstream project itself. We have a lot of customers, for example. that are leveraging the upstream stable kernel. So we tend to work very closely also with the upstream stable kernel team because we're seeing performance and security enhancements on that front as well.

And again, it's actually, it's kind of an interesting way to consider the enterprise Linux ecosystem because you still get that completely compatible user space. So all your applications work, everything works as expected, but you're also now getting, you know, a better hardware support. In some cases, again, better performance.

And in some cases, you know, many times better security coverage by using the upstream stable kernel. So we've we've kind of played and dabbled with that for some of our big customers.

Jonathan: Yeah. All right. Well, we are at the end of our time. But I did want to ask each of you give the opportunity. Is there anything that I didn't ask about that we didn't cover that you want to make sure and get in?

And let's let let's let Christa go first, actually. Is there anything we didn't talk about that you wanted to let folks know about?

Krista: Well, I just want to say, I think one of the things that makes our community stand out is that we try to really engage with the people in the community. We think, we like to say, with the different Enterprise Linux distributions, to choose the one that fits you the best.

For us, I think some of the things that help us stand out are the community and the documentation. And our group of special interest groups that are SIGs that they are the groups that provide the things that are in addition to what Rocky Linux is, such as when we, when we do security fixes that need to be done before they're fixed upstream, they, they can be found there.

So people can add those for additional hardening. We love our documentation tree and then with our community, our community. I've been thinking about was the fact that there are several things that motivate people to engage in open source community and that can be anything from financial to psychological, like, as far as well being is concerned, it can be social, it can be educational, which is what brought me in, and it can be just for the chance to contribute freely to something on your own terms.

So as a community, the way I'm trying to grow it is by acknowledging that those are all ways that people can get something from our community and to address them in the ways that we can. So that as many people as possible, when they come to our community, they give themselves what they have to give, and then that they give something in return.

So that is my great goal for our community as the way to make it stand out.

Jonathan: Yeah, very good. And anything, anything else that we didn't talk about that you guys wanted to cover?

Gregory: I'll throw something out there. Sure. So before Rocky was created and it was literally like a month or two, I think, before December of

Jonathan: 2020,

Gregory: I was having conversation with some of my, my friends that are, you know, in open source and whatnot, and we were kind of talking about.

You know, comparing the shades of gray in our beards and, and, and talking about kind of what things were like, you know, in early open source and, and how amazing it was that, that an engineer contributor could make such a profound impact to the world. And and it, it, it kind of, we reflected that it was, it seemed a little sad that.

It kind of felt like that wasn't going to happen ever again. And the, the, the people that had that opportunity again, you know generations of, of, you know, graveyards in a matter of speaking. And, and we, we, you know, people that are newer to the field. May not ever see something on and then almost like, like serendipity magic, rocky happened and rocky has been so influential to so many people in terms of what it, what it does to Chris's point.

It is a, it is a. Social gathering place. It is a collaboration. It is a place where people who have never actually even maybe even just joining the field of technology or don't have kind of this long pedigree contributing an open source is a tremendous thing to put on your resume. It's a tremendous amount of experience that you can put under your belt.

And again, I mean, Kristen nailed this like everyone can go do this and you can do it on your time. So I want to stress whether you, whether, you know, somebody decides to join Rocky or they decide to join another open source project, get involved with open source. It really is truly special and choose, choose what community you want to be part of.

And I also want to say that. You don't have to be a software engineer, a software developer, to bring value to an open source project. Now, younger projects, sometimes, yeah, it's probably a little bit more on the technical side. But especially as the projects are a project starts to grow. They need every single role that you can imagine from documentation to marketing to even sales.

Like in some cases you are many, many projects need donations. Like it is a very different personality from an engineer to a salesperson, to somebody who's going to go and be successful in helping to gather funds. For, for an open source project there is governance, there is leadership, there is management there is program management, project management is even like, like everything you can imagine, like, like, come and join, you have an interest in being part of some of this I just want to encourage people that you may not be a traditional kind of engineer.

Software developer. There's value you can bring to an open source community. And I can tell you, if you decide that you want to check out Rocky, please do. Our community is wonderful. It's, it's very welcoming. Krista runs this cause she's, she's much friendlier than I am. And nobody likes Krista more than me.

So so Krista runs this and reach out, like come join our matter most at chat. rockylinux. org and come join in you'll see Krista there. You'll see me there. You'll see everybody there. And it's a fun place to hang out. It's a fun place to talk. And there's a lot of really cool things that are happening.

So come

Jonathan: join. Very cool. All right. Final questions for each of you and Well, the final question is, and we'll start with Krista, favorite text editor and scripting language. And I know sometimes for the community people that that question doesn't mean quite the same as it does to, to the, the engineer types, but all the same.

Krista: My favorite scripting language is in English.

Jonathan: That's fair. And text editor?

Krista: I use Windows.

Jonathan: That's fine. Like I said, we get I would love

Krista: to be more technical than I am. And I would love to sound more technical than I just did. Yeah. That's perfect. I use commonly available tools.

Jonathan: That's perfectly fine. Like I said, we get It's obviously a set of questions that are very much geared towards developers.

And when we get people that are from either either the business side of things or the community side of things It's just it's sort of a mismatch of the questions. But at the same time, it's fun. So Greg same two questions.

Gregory: So they're related for me. For almost all of my programming career I used vim and Leverage Vim, I still think in Vim, even when I'm in a Google Doc, I think in Vim.

So you'll see lots of random I's, A's, and colon W's all over my docs. With that being said going to the next question, again, which is related I've coded a lot historically, and you can make fun of me, in Perl, and in the past. And I'm really, I prefer C. As my primary programming language but within the last four years within with through a container system that I, that I created called a singularity and I moved it to Linux foundation.

It's now called obtainer. That's now in go I recoded a, where cluster provisioning system called werewolf that I've been running since 2001. I could recode that and go. And when I did that, I decided to use an IDE because picking up a new language with an IDE is much easier.

Jonathan: And

Gregory: so I chose VS Code for that.

So my text editor of choice is still Vim. But when I'm coding nowadays, I end up in VS Code. More often than not and Go is both a programming language as well as a scripting language.

Jonathan: Someone needs to come up with a browser extension to give us evil mode for Google Docs. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Somebody out there listening, let's get on that. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Alright Gregory and Krista, thank you both so much for being here. It's been a blast getting to talk about Rocky Linux and CIQ and the Rocky Software Foundation and the community there. Thank you both so much for your time.

Krista: Thanks for having us.

Jonathan: Thank you. Yeah. All right. And boy, that was a great conversation. Really, really enjoyed that. And, and love the the, the comparison and contrast with all Millennics and just that, that agreement that we're all happy that both of them are there. And I think that's great. That I think that's a neat story out of this.

So next week we've actually got something really cool and it's gonna be two weeks from when we record today, but if you watch this on the download after it's edited, it'll just be a week away. We're talking with Shimon Shacham about NAND to Tetris. That is an open source. But of courseware where you start with the most basic building block, the NAND gate, and you work through building a an A LU and A CPU, and then writing assembly code for that and building a very simple compiler all the way up to running Tetris on this computer that as a student, you.

And the whole thing is open source, and I think it's one of the most fun courses out there, and I asked Simon about it, and he's willing to come on and talk about it on the show. So that is the plan. We record that on the 25th, and it'll go live on the 26th, and so we hope to see everybody there. We appreciate everybody that watches and listens, both live and on the download, and we will see you all next week on Floss Weekly.