On 04/05/2021 20:51, James M. Pulver wrote: > Honestly, I've seen a lot of the FLOSS community prefer Rocky over Alma, and > I think it's because Rocky is actually not backed by any company. However, we > see how that went before, and I just think Rocky as described is ripe for > CENTOS 2.0 to me. It's even run by one of the CENTOS founders, so -- maybe > he's learned his lesson, but I don't see that as a positive for Rocky - it's > neutral at best. I mean, CENTOS was bought by Red Hat and then "killed".
Didn't the founder of Rocky leave CentOS before it was 'bought' by Red Hat? My understanding is that both Alma and Rocky are getting foundations set up to support and own them, making it much harder for them to either be bought out or acquihired. As I understand it, CentOS was not 'bought' as such by Red Hat because there was no single entity to buy. What Red Hat did (as I understand it) was to hire all the key developers and then independently buy the rights to trademarks and IP, etc. A proper foundation structure with a defined constitution/mission should in theory protect against that kind of buy out/acquihire. Even if all the future key developers are hired by a competitor, the software, trademarks, IP, etc. will not be so easily purchased.
