stwn

Seeing @herrold again inspired me to share the foundation story about the creation of @CentOS... Back in like 2001-2002'ish it all started with this wacky idea I had to create a community distribution of Linux, kinda like @debian, but RPM based. I started talking to a bunch of people about it locally around Berkeley as I was architect of the HPC team @LBNL and joint appointment to @UCBerkeley at the time. We coordinated on IRC, and several of us met weekly at @JupiterBerkeley to have beers and discuss how we would do something like this. I started calling it Community Assembled Operating System: cAos. I put the capitalization in the wrong place, because I was young and stupid (I'm still stupid, just not as young now). On the IRC side, @herrold was the main coordinator and advocate. @herrold was very well connected in Red Hat, RPM, and various open source communities already, and I assumed he loved the project because he was one of the biggest developer advocates. He brought in Seth Vidal (creator of YUM, predecessor to DNF), Jeff Johnson (one of the founders and main developers of RPM), among a bunch of other amazing people. The project started getting more attention, and when I asked who should lead this, @herrold was one of the people who pointed at me. So Caos Linux was born (and I refuse to do the weird capitalization thing now). Also, I created a 501(c)3 non-profit for the Caos Foundation to host the project and infrastructure. The operating system was based on a core foundation of Red Hat Linux (before RHEL), which was freely available. This allowed us to have a very compatible foundation as we were hoping to have enough API and system similarity with Red Hat Linux that many apps, tooling, and experience translates directly over. The foundation of the operating system was designed to be completely API/ABI stable, locked, and self hosting (e.g. the core can rebuild itself, install those RPMs into a new chroot, and rebuild itself again, and constantly do this on every change). I was the developer and maintainer of the "Caos Core". On top of the Caos Core was the extended operating system. These were all of the packages that were community maintained. I developed a portal for developers to sign up and join to either contribute packages or adopt packages leveraging CVS under the hood. I'm not sure if @esrtweet remembers, but he actually joined up to maintain some of his code like Fetchmail. @jsquyres (project lead and scientist of LAM and OpenMPI) joined up to maintain MPI. Rémi Cohen Scali, who was a Gnome maintainer at the time, joined to contribute and maintain Gnome, and many other amazing people... The project grew wonderfully! Red Hat then introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2 (there was no public version 1), and shortly after that version 3, and shortly after that (IIRC), announced the end of life of Red Hat Linux, the freely available operating system that most of the world was using at the time. This affected Caos Linux, because some of our core depended on it. One of our project contributors, Rocky McGaugh mentioned that he's been doing RHL rebuilds for his HPC company, and we can base off of that. The Caos "tech lead" Michael Jennings, also maintained a rebuild of RHL at the time called Vermillion, which many people may remember comes from VA Linux back in the day. So we had expertise in rebuilding RHL already, and they offered to start rebuilding RHEL internally so we could use it as needed. Shortly after that, there was an announcement on Slashdot of a new Linux distribution called White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) built by John Morris. I immediately reached out to John congratulating him on the project and offering him resources within the Caos Foundation if he wanted any help. He mentioned to me that he is beyond overwhelmed at the attention he is getting and didn't intend to maintain it long term. Upon sharing that with the members of the Caos Foundation, it was decided that we should release our rebuild work under the name "Caos EL" (Enterprise Linux), Rocky would lead development of the RHEL 3 rebuild, and John Newbigin would lead development of the RHEL 2 rebuild, and my role was to lead the project itself. Another Caos member was Lance Davis. Lance was busy with his own company out of the UK (uklinux IIRC), and he reached out to me proposing the name "CentOS". My main response to it was that I didn't like the "OS" being capitalized, because that puts emphasis on the "Cent" part of the name and this project is designed to always be free, so I said I liked "Centos" (prounced without the "ohh-ess" at the end), and thus the project had a proper name. Funnily, many people in the community seemed to immediately adopt the "cent-ohh-ess" pronunciation, and is probably why there was always three different ways to pronounce it: "cent-ohh-ess", "cent-ahh-s", and "cent-ohhs". Sorry, probably my fault. LOL Rocky announced the name change from Caos EL to CentOS on the email list and that he is almost all the way through v3, when he went AWOL. Not to disclose too much out of professional curtesy, but he passed away before he ever got to know how much of an impact his work would have on the world (Rocky Linux is a H/T to him, thank you Rocky!). Lance took over the final bits of CentOS-3 and drove it to release, with John having CentOS-2 done shortly after. From there, Caos Linux usage subsided and CentOS took off as one of the most widely used operating systems ever. And now you know, the rest of the story...