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CloudLinux To Invest A Million Dollars Annually In Project Lenix

Jan. 8, 2021, 4:08 p.m.

TL;DR

Just recently, CloudLinux announced that it would invest $1 million annually in Project Lenix. The Project Lenix involves the development and establishment of a community initiative around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) fork. The project will further be a safe haven for CentOS and this CentOS Stream is the future of the CentOS project.

Cloud Linux moved on the path as a response to the Red Hat’s announcement which left CentOS unstable and a form of testing ground for Red Hat.

Key Facts

1
Based on the research conducted on the CloudLinux website with 2,000 Linux enthusiasts, over 60% of the users are going to wait for another RHEL fork to be released instead of migrating to Ubuntu, Debian, or any paid operating systems.
2
CloudLinux is sponsoring Project Lenix and has declared that it will lead to the creation of a free and open-sourced binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 as well as expected future releases.
3
The investment decision by CloudLinux was taken due to several changes in the main CentOS
4
Cloud Linux moved on the path as a response to the Red Hat’s announcement which left CentOS unstable and a form of testing ground for Red Hat.
5
Cloud Linux decision will drive Linux innovation by giving the broader ecosystem community a closer connection to the development of RHEL.

Details

Building on the announcement where Red Hat declared that they would no longer invest in the fork of the RHEL distribution, a lot has happened, including the co-founder of CentOS launching the Rocky Linux, which is free and is supported by various IT organizations. Although CloudLinux has previously provided a hardened edition of CentOS that has been installed more than 200,000 times by 4,000-plus customers, the organization has decided to spend $1 million annually on the CentOs clone under the name Project Lenix.

Project Lenix. Image Courtesy: https://www.linuxcareer.com/project-lenix-the-centos-replacement-interview-with-founder-igor-seletskiy

Project Lenix is an open-sourced & community-Driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8. It is a standalone, completely free OS sponsored and maintained by CloudLinux Inc, support of the future RHEL® releases, governed by the members of the community.

Also, it is open-sourced so that the community can keep contributing and should in case things go wrong from the organization angle; then the contributors can ensure the project maintains the right direction.

Project Lenix is set to allow several IT teams to achieve several things, including converting an entire fleet of servers with a single command without reinstallations or rebooting.

CloudLinux has over 10 years of experience building a hardened CentOS Linux developed for data centers and especially hosting companies. Does this make them the perfect organization to sponsor and lead an alternative for the popular CentOS?

According to a survey by the same company, results indicate that the overwhelming majority of the community is waiting for another RHEL fork:

60.5% Wait for another RHEL fork to be released (CloudLinux Project, Rocky Linux, etc.)
16.7% Use Debian instead
12.4% Migrate to Ubuntu
10.4% Opt for openSUSE

CentOS is dead and CentOS stream is not a replacement to CentOs as declared by Red Hat CTO Chris Wright:

> CentOS Stream isn’t a replacement for CentOS Linux; rather, it’s a natural, inevitable next step intended to fulfil the project’s goal of furthering enterprise Linux innovation. Stream shortens the feedback loop between developers on all sides of the RHEL landscape, making it easier for all voices, be they large partners or individual contributors, to be heard as we craft future versions of RHEL.

After the death of CentOS, forks and other initiatives have emerged to pick up the torch. Rocky Linux, Lenix project, and others will try to seduce the orphan community.

As CloudLinux already maintain CloudLinux OS, we plan to release the Project Lenix - a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8 (and future releases) in the Q1 of 2021. We will create a separate, totally free operating system (OS) that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions). We will sponsor the development & maintenance of such OS. We will work on establishing a community around the OS, with the governing board from members of the community.
Igor Seletskiy
CEO & Founder of CloudLinux Inc.