AlmaLinux started when Red Hat decided to shift away from the regular CentOS model. To give some background, Red Hat decided to stop producing CentOS Linux and move to CentOS stream—which is really like an upstream of RHEL versus downstream of RHEL. When that happened, we decided that we should fill that gap and respond to the broad community request for someone to step up. We have the resources to do it and we know how to do it because of our combined histories working on similar projects. So, we decided to jump right in.

When we started, we saw a lot of craziness going on. One of the things we wanted to do was send a message to encourage developers to stay on the path, continue engaging with the CentOS project, and continue engaging with the community that was already working on projects.

I feel like a lot of people started to atrophy and fall away. Many developers wanted to leave to join other communities. As a long-time Linux open source person, you know the power of your community. The health of your community dictates how well your project is going to do and its longevity. Open source has been so successful, but we saw people trying to move away for various reasons. We wanted to show by example that continuous engagement, staying the course, and continuing to work with people is the best path to success. Of course, no community is perfect—that's for sure—but we just wanted to make sure that we sent that message and I think we've been successful doing that, so far.

The times of upheaval continue. Our mission is to be there and provide the community what they need—whether that's downstream of RHEL or forging our own path. Either way, I think it's all about just listening to what the community needs and giving it to them. I think that's a lot. We continue to listen to the community and ensure we are responsive.

Technology was one piece of it, but the experience was an even bigger piece of it. The only reason we're able to operate at the speed at which we operate is because of our combined experience. Between us, we have a century of experience building packages, tracking down issues with packages, packaging packages, and everything else that’s required to put together a distribution—whether it's on the single package level or delivering that as an ISO—whatever type of image you want to put out there for consumption.

Being confident in what we are able to do definitely helped spur the speed at which we operated and our success. A tremendous amount of credit goes to Red Hat because we were taking code that they had already created and rebuilt it. They had already done a lot of the heavy lifting and we definitely lived on the shoulder of giants.

Everything that goes into our build is open. AlmaLinux.org is where all the package builds take place and where you can track everything including which commits get pulled in, what artifacts get billed, where the artifacts are being stored, and how they're signed. We've been implementing some software supply chain security and we're not using anything that Red Hat Fedora used—this was totally put together from scratch.

We had some ideas on how we could improve the process—which I think we accomplished. It's all out in public—which is really the most important part. The biggest thing is being able to share those bits and pieces with everyone so that others can learn from it.

It wasn't ever a question to support Arm64 or not. A big part of that choice was looking at our user base and understanding where they are. A lot of people are running Linux in the cloud and prefer Arm64 because they love running on Ampere hardware for the performance benefits—the energy savings and the cost savings.

We wanted to skate to where the puck is going and not where it is, and we definitely see the rise of Arm64. This is the future, and we need to get in on the ground floor and make sure that we're there helping spur that innovation along.

To me, it’s all real estate, and you're basically selling tenancy. The more tenancy you can squeeze out of whatever you have, the better it'll be. With an Ampere platform, you're saving on your electricity bill and I think that's even more important. The two important things for the user are savings and performance improvement. I was in the data center last week and saw racks and racks of Ampere servers being put in or replacing traditional legacy hardware, so you know people are paying attention. The secret is out of the bag, I guess.

Yes, so actually activity is still going on in both 8 and 9. The next releases are minor point releases, so I don't envision too many new features. For the most part, it's going to be a lot of bug fixes and merging in a lot of what's happened in the upstream kernels. We might get a few other things here and there but it's just going to be a maintenance release at this point.

We’re changing how we work with Red Hat and we’re open to trying new things and even putting out some of our own kernels and enabling things like other file systems. Some of these changes will be coming out in the near future.

Nothing has really changed there. We still want to be enablers of community and we want to work within the existing community structures that are there. We're not interested in starting up our own thing or anything like that. The plan is to continue working the way we are and even if we do start our own cig on something, we don’t intend to take away from anything upstream. Instead, we want to coalesce what we have around our project and then help move forward in a way that makes sense.