man(1)

NAME
Rocky Linux - A Community Enterprise Operating System

DESCRIPTION
Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with America's top enterprise Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Rocky Linux is led by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project.

HISTORY OF THE NAME
The name "Rocky" was chosen as a tribute to Rocky McGaugh, a co-founder of CentOS. In the words of Gregory Kurtzer, "He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you Rocky Linux."

GOALS
Rocky Linux, as a distribution, has a primary goal of being a community enterprise distribution that the world can install and use to their liking, as an alternative to RHEL or CentOS. As a community, there are other goals (from our Community Charter missions):

•   Build a community of individuals and organizations to develop and foster enterprise-grade, open source solutions.

•   Work together to provide for the needs of the enterprise community.

•   The security, stability, and integrity of our projects are paramount.

•   Enable knowledge sharing, inclusiveness, collaboration, and open communication.

•   Coordinate with the commercial, research, academic, and public sectors to help bring their products, technologies, and support into enterprise environments.

•   Always make decisions in the best interest of the enterprise community while being beholden to no specific organization(s)

More information is in our community charter found at /usr/share/doc/rocky-release/COMMUNITY-CHARTER and https://rockylinux.org/community-charter/

COMMUNICATION
There are many ways you can communicate with the community.

•   IRC: irc.libera.chat/#rockylinux

•   Mattermost: https://chat.rockylinux.org

•   Forums: https://forums.rockylinux.org

WHY?
You're probably wondering what this is for. Whether you found it on accident or you were hunting for easter eggs. The answer is an interesting one (at least to me). It was your average monday with standup with Release Engineering. We were discussing the path to 8.4 and what's next, whether that was patches we needed to do right then and PR's upstream to reduce future work. It got us thinking about easter eggs to put into the distribution. Nothing too crazy, just the small things. Things that we would hope would be found and perhaps shared through our various communication mediums (such as twitter and mattermost). So this man page was born as a direct result of those ideas. Now you might be asking yourself, 'well where does the name come in?' That's also a good question, because originally we weren't going to have a code name for our releases. We realized really quickly that we should add one to satisfy vendors (and others in the community that expect one), instead of putting a name somewhere and hoping someone would find it. While that last part is technically still true in terms of other leaders, we figured it wouldn't hurt to add one. The code names don't affect the functionality of the distribution. To be honest, I see them as aesthetics more than anything. In the end, we all thought it was a good idea and decided we should put one in. 'Why didn't you just name them based on characters from Rocky Balboa?' We really did consider that, trust me. "Rocky" managed to create its own set of memes when it started (some of the memes were pretty good, let's be honest). It almost seemed fitting that we'd use a name from the series. Realistically though, we'd run out of names. We could've named this one "Adrian" (secretly it is) and left it be. But instead, we decided let's use the names of actual rocks/minerals. I also figured that we can't just use a rock name. Rocks have colors or other adjectives that describe them. Green Obsidian was chosen for our 8 release. Obsidian is an igneous rock, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Obsidian is slightly harder than common window glass. Green Obsidian is certainly a beautiful color for obsidian rock. For those who know their color theory may already know this, green represents "freshness", "hope", "vitality", "growth", "balance", "harmony", and "health", among other things. Green Obsidian as itself has its own set of meanings, such as "strength." Choosing green as the first color for our first release was definitely not on accident, in this regard. Before I let you go, I want to personally thank you for installing Rocky Linux. This distribution would not be possible without the hard work, dedication, and passion of the community to want to keep an always free Enterprise Linux distribution. We hope that you enjoy using this distribution and continue to support us in the future.

AUTHOR
Louis Abel <label@rockylinux.org> @nazunalika

SEE ALSO

•   /usr/share/doc/rocky-release/COMMUNITY-CHARTER

•   https://rockylinux.org

•   https://chat.rockylinux.org

•   https://twitter.com/rocky_linux

COPYRIGHT
2021, Rocky Linux Project, Licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License