Origins of Enterprise Focused Linux Distributions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a paid distribution, which is owned by Red Hat and was released in 2002. Its main purpose was to provide a stable distribution with long term, reliable support for enterprises. CentOS was founded in 2004 as a free alternative that was recompiled from the open source RHEL source code, without the trademarked logos and assets.

Eventually Red Hat partnered with CentOS in 2014. Then, following an acquisition of Red Hat by IBM in 2019, Red Hat announced that CentOS would be transitioning to a rolling release, upstream version of the RHEL distribution which resulted in a rift of a free and stable distribution that was capable of running in enterprise environments.

This resulted in the release of mainly two large distributions that were meant to fill that role. AlmaLinux in March of 2021 by CloudLinux, and Rocky Linux in June of 2021 by CentOS Co-Founder Gregory Kurtzer. One fun example of AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux being used in the world today is running inside data centers for high performance computing and ai clusters.