If you’ve had your eyes on the news, you may have read the CentOS 8 end-of-life announcement by Red Hat. The announcement came with several significant changes to the CentOS project roadmap which is bound to affect infrastructure and deployment plans for end-users as well as data centers and online businesses.
The most relevant change to us currently is the accelerated end-of-life for CentOS 8 which means that as of December 31, 2021, no further operating system updates will be available. Summarily, CentOS 8 will be transformed into CentOS Stream – a development branch of RHEL with previous versions remaining part of the stable branch. Users are therefore advised not to use CentOS 8 in production environments.
In light of the foregoing, the creators of CloudLinux has announced their commitment to release Project Lenix – a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 and its future releases in the first quarter of 2021.
The company is set to invest an annual sum of $1 million in development and will establish a community initiative around its RHEL fork intended as a safe haven for CentOS users left stranded by the RedHat announcement.
In the official Cloud Linux blog post, the CEO and founder of CloudLinux, Igor Seletskiy said:
RedHat’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.
Who is CloudLinux?
CloudLinux Inc. is a company on a mission to continually increase the security, stability, and availability of Linux servers and devices by developing a hardened Linux distribution, Linux kernel live security patching, extended support options for Linux, and web server security software used by enterprises, service providers, governments and universities all over the world.
With 10 years of experience building their operating system for data centers and hosting companies, CloudLinux is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with over 4,000 customers and partners, 500,000 product installations globally, and dedicated analysts and developers with a combined Linux experience worth north of years complemented with a passion for delivering the best customer care.
It is our hope and that of the CloudLinux and Project Lenix teams that Linux enthusiasts will join the discussion as we work to create a stable Linux distro in the true spirit of the FOSS community!
