Here’s another CentOS clone - and this one is backed by a million dollars a year

A major server OS vendor has announced to sponsor the development of a community-driven fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The decision comes less than a week after IBM/Red Hat decided to kill CentOS, the most popular RHEL fork, as we know it.

CloudLinux, which makes a popular CentOS-based OS for servers, has decided to pump a million dollars a year into a 100% binary compatible clone named Project Lenix.

“As we already maintain CloudLinux OS, we plan to release a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases) in the Q1 of 2021,” CloudLinux wrote in a blog announcing the news.

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Community control

Project Lenix joins Rocky Linux, announced by the original founder of CentOS, as the two high-profile forks of the popular IBM/Red Hat-owned server OS that’s decided to shift focus to a rolling release variant.

CloudLinux will sponsor the development and maintenance of the fork and more importantly will help create a community around the OS complete with a governing board made up of community members. The company also plans to open source their build and testing toolchain to encourage community participation.

According to CloudLinux’s website, the company’s flagship CentOS-based offering is used by 4000 customers including the likes of Liquid Web, 1&1, and Dell.

It now plans to bring its expertise to the open source Lenix project. In the blog, the company claims its first RHEL 8-based release will be supported till 2029, just like the now-axed CentOS 8. Furthermore, users running CentOS 8 will be able to convert their existing installation to Lenix with a single command that swaps out the CentOS repositories.