CloudLinux company, developing the eponymous commercial distribution based on the RHEL package base, announced the project Lenix , in which community participation is planned to develop a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux similar to CentOS. allocated over a million dollars a year.
It is noted that CloudLinux has ten years of experience in creating assemblies based on RHEL source packages, a ready-made infrastructure and a large staff of developers and maintainers. The motivation for developing a free RHEL build is to promote a commercial Linux kernel update service without rebooting KernelCare and providing extended support . For example, CloudLinux provides an extended support service for CentOS 6, which continues to publish updates until 2024, despite the end of the maintenance cycle of the CentOS 6 branch.
Like CentOS, the Lenix distribution will be free, open source and one-to-one binary compatible with RHEL 8. The first release of is slated for the first quarter of 2021. Updates for Lenix 8 will be released until 2029. For migration from CentOS 8, a toolkit will be prepared that will allow one team to replace repositories and keys from CentOS to Lenix.
CloudLinux will sponsor the development and provide the necessary resources, but the distribution will be developed separately from CloudLinux OS in the form of an independent project … All the tools used to develop the distribution will be open and in case of dissatisfaction with the actions of CloudLinux, the community will be able to pick up the development of the project at any time. Around Lenix it is planned to form a community, from which representatives will be formed a governing council, coordinating the issues related to the development of the distribution.