CIQ Unveils a Version of Rocky Linux for the Enterprise

On Oct. 8, 2024, CIQ announced the launch of Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC). This is an enterprise-grade version of the popular open source Rocky Linux distribution. This new offering aims to meet the needs of organizations that rely on Rocky Linux but require additional security, compliance, and support features for their enterprise environments.

If that sounds like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while CIQ wouldn’t put it that way, you wouldn’t be far wrong either. Rocky Linux, for those of us who don’t know this distro, is a revival of CentOS, the former RHEL clone. When Red Hat retired this iteration in favor of CentOS Stream, CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer announced he’d create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement, which he named in honor of his late CentOS co-founder Rocky McGough.

Today, Rocky Linux comes in two versions: Rocky Linux  8.10, for the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures, and Rocky Linux 9.4, for the x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures. CIQ has offered technical support for Rocky Linux since 2021, and tech support is still available today. RLC is an addition to CIQ’s support offering, not a successor.

What RLC gives you, besides full compatibility with the community edition of Rocky Linux and RHEL, are the following enhancements:

• Security and Compliance: The enterprise version includes verified packages, guaranteed security patches, and remediation of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) within specified service level objectives (SLOs).
• Legal Protection: CIQ offers customers indemnification in the event of intellectual property disputes related to open source license compliance.
• Supply Chain Validation: Verified packages are hosted in US-based repositories and mirrored globally to ensure proximity to customer data centers.
• Private Repository Access: Subscribers gain access to CIQ’s private repositories for Rocky Linux packages, ISO images, and container images.

In short, as Kurtzer, who’s also the CEO of CIQ, explained in a statement, “Rocky Linux from CIQ meets the needs of organizations who want to run community Rocky Linux within their IT infrastructure but need contractual guarantees and mitigation to liabilities that the open-source community cannot provide. Now you can have the best of both worlds.”

Rocky Linux from CIQ is now available with an annual flat-rate subscription price of $25,000/year. It’s an interesting take: CIQ doesn’t count your environments or audit usage. You pay one price no matter how many instances you’re using or where you run them.

Of course, RLC isn’t the only RHEL-style Linux distro with business support around. Besides RHEL itself, Oracle has Oracle Linux. While the community RHEL Linux clone AlmaLinux OS doesn’t offer business support, companies such as OpenLogic and  TuxCare offer tech support for the distro.

Still, RLC’s launch represents a significant step in Rocky Linux’s evolution as a viable business Linux option. It offers enterprises a robust, secure, and compliant option for their Linux infrastructure needs while maintaining the benefits of open source software.