Rocky Linux Community Rallies Support: The Formidable Impact of CIQ as a Key Backer - Insights From ZDNet

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CIQ is a relatively new company. Its leadership, however, has deep roots in open-source software and Linux. Besides Gregory M. Kurtzer, CIQ’s co-founder and CEO, who was a creator of CentOS , the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, its new executive team -- announced Wednesday – boasts two of the founders of Linuxcare , the first company to make supporting Linux a priority.

CIQ and Rocky Linux founder Gregory M. Kurtzer.

Rocky Linux

Today, the first business model that comes to mind for Linux or open-source software is to offer paid business support. It wasn’t always that way. In Linux’s early days, companies such as Caldera , Red Hat , and SUSE still thought you could make money by selling Linux in a box to ordinary users.

Before Red Hat figured this out, when it retired Red Hat Linux in favor of the commercial RHEL in 2003 , Linuxcare had already emerged as the first important Linux support company in 1998. Unfortunately, business problems and the dot-com crash didn’t allow Linuxcare to become a top company. As the saying goes, first movers lose, second movers win .

But, that water is well over the dam now. Today, former Linuxcare founders Art Tyde, CIQ’s VP of business development, and David LaDuke, VP of marketing, bring decades of hard-won experience to the table. Other well-known veteran technology leaders such as Robert Adolph, co-founder and chief product officer; Rob Dufalo, SVP of engineering; John Frey, CTO; Stephen Moody, SVP support and technology; Marlin Prager, CFO; and Brock Taylor, VP of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and strategic partners, have joined them.

Also: Rocky Linux arrived with everything you need to replicate the distro

Many tech businesses are under the delusion that only the young can make a difference. Indeed, many believe that if you’re over 40, you’re too old for tech .

Wrong! CIQ values maturity and experience over youth and exuberance. And since CIQ recently secured $26 million in Series A funding led by Two Bear Capital , it’s not the only one that thinks it’s on the right track.

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Rocky Linux , CIQ and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation ‘s free CentOS Linux clone, is proving to be massively successful. It’s reached Linux distro image downloads of up to 750,000 a month. But CIQ isn’t betting its future on being a Linux distro provider.

True, CIQ offers Rocky Linux support. But it also has several HPC offerings. These include Warewulf , cluster management and operating system provisioning for HPC; Apptainer , a Linux Foundation -supported HPC container open-source project; Traditional HPC , a Rocky Linux and Warewulf-based HPC approach for in-house servers; and Fuzzball: HPC-2.0, an HPC designed to work on the cloud.

It’s going to be interesting to see how well this all works. Personally, I’m expecting this bet on experience and hard-won wisdom to be successful.

Related stories:

• Rocky Linux 9 arrives with everything you need to replicate the distro on your own
• Rocky Linux optimized for Google Cloud arrives
• CentOS clone Rocky Linux gets technical support

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