CloudLinux Introduces AlmaLinux OS As A Replacement For CentOS

CloudLinux has announced AlmaLinux OS and an associated open source development foundation. The company has ready the first stable release of the software, which should serve as a replacement for CentOS.

AlmaLinux is a fork of RHEL 8.3 and can therefore be considered a clone of CentOS Linux 8. CloudLinux emphasizes that it is a project that is supported by the open source community of developers, which is partly why the company is setting up the AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation.

That nonprofit receives a million dollars annually from CloudLinux as support and as community manager Jack Aboutboul has been appointed. In the past, he worked as a community architect at Red Hat and as a community engineer for the Fedora project.

CloudLinux has published the first beta release of AlmaLinux OS 8.3 and put a Github page and wiki online. The company announced that it would launch a RHEL fork at the end of 2020, then under the name Project Lenix.

CloudLinux is the company behind CloudLinux OS, which is based on CentOS and used by shared hosting service providers. The company is not alone in coming up with a CentOS replacement. The co-founder of CentOS himself, Gregory Kurtzer, previously announced his intention to release the CentOS clone Rocky Linux.

The announcements follow Red Hat’s decision last year to move from CentOS to CentOS Stream. CentOS thus no longer became a rebuilding project for RHEL, but an upstream project for that OS. Many system administrators were taken by surprise by that announcement and criticized Red Hat’s plans.