I was curious why CERN and Fermilab chose AlmaLinux instead of Rocky Linux. After googling, I found out that the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which controls Rocky Linux, is a public-benefit corporation. This is a for-profit type of corporation, unlike what the name suggests. The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which in my mind is clearly the type of organization that should control such an OS.
Your headline is sensationalist and inaccurate, and your description has only partial truths. You need to appreciate some history to understand that Rocky is not for profit and why. This isn’t anti-Alma, which was founded and is supported by Cloudlinux - a commercial company by the way - because that’s not actually important either.
Rocky Linux is owned by RESF which is owned by Greg Kurtzner, backed by a board of trustees. Greg, together with Jason “Rocky” McGaugh, created CentOS Linux back in 2004. Since then, Redhat “Embraced, extended and then extinguished” CentOS Linux through gaining legal ownership of the project and its name, and control of its board of trustees.
When Redhat (through control of CentOs’ board) finally pulled the rug (with very little notice) on CentOS 8 in 2020, Greg figured he could correct the organisational mistakes made with CentOs that allowed Redhat to kill it. He talks about that here In honour of Jason, who has since died, he named the new distro Rocky.
Rocky must be owned by a legal entity, and they chose a PBC - the reasoning is described very clearly on Rocky’s website here and it’s made clear that it is not for profit. It’s possibly that might change, sure, but somewhere along the line you have to look at the bigger picture and decide to trust a distro. I trust Rocky. I also trust Debian and OpenSuse. And, because they’ve also proved themselves honest and transparent ** despite being founded and sponsored by a commercial company** , I trust Alma. All are good choices. The beautiful part about all these good, open and free distributions is you can choose which you want to use, that you’re not locked into them and whether you want to contribute or not.
There /is/ a link to CiQ with Rocky via Greg, and CiQ is commercial, but Rocky itself is not, is definitely NOT for profit, and there’s no need to pay CiQ a bean if you don’t want to.
Anyone can pick holes in any distribution. They can take any part of the legal structure and present it to suit their own agenda, or misunderstand the whole.
Ok. I understand what you are saying, and there might be historical reasons for the founders of Rocky to believe they can defend better against a takeover by being a PBC. I don’t know if that’s true, I’m not a lawyer. The thing is that if an organization can legally make a profit, I don’t trust that it does not. I’m not trying to insult Greg Kurtzner, I don’t know him. But I wouldn’t need to trust him if they had made a non-profit.
And sure, Alma exists because of funding from corporate interests, but so does the Linux kernel, and GNOME, and probably a large percentage of free software. That’s the point of copyleft, when companies improve free software it remains free.
Personally I’ve never used RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux. I was just curious why Fermilab and CERN chose Alma instead of Rocky, which I had heard about more. I found out and I believe they did the right thing, hence the headline. I have no fucking agenda. (maybe you do)
PS: The whole thing, including this post, assumes that Alma and Rocky have the same goal (which apparently is no longer true), and that non-profits can make no money (which… WTF IKEA).
You have very strong opinions about something you admit you have little understanding of.