History of CentOS: How a biochemist's Linux hobby project became the enterprise world's default operating system
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History of CentOS: How a biochemist's Linux hobby project became the enterprise world's default operating system
When a community came together after Red Hat said Windows was 'probably the right product'
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Steven<br>J. Vaughan-Nichols
Published<br>mon 8 Jun 2026 // 10:15 UTC
INTERVIEW Gregory Kurtzer, CentOS's founder, tells the story of how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone was born of a small group of rebuild hackers and Linux fans who were angry that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had replaced Red Hat Linux and convinced they could do better.<br>Back in 2003, Linux fans were ticked off at Red Hat because they were replacing the end-user-friendly Red Hat Linux with the business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a smart move for Red Hat, but users were pissed when then Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users, Windows was probably "the right product line." Yeah. That went over about as well as you'd expect.<br>In the meantime, Gregory Kurtzer had no plans to start building a Linux distribution, he says. He came out of biochemistry and genomics, where compute‑hungry (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) (BLAST) jobs were chewing through early SGI systems. One day, his business partner suggested they try Linux.
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"He said there was this thing called Linux, he wanted to try, and I thought he was mispronouncing Unix," Kurtzer tells The Register. They drove to Fry's, "bought a ton of hardware," and discovered that a free operating system downloaded off the internet could run serious scientific workloads.
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It wasn't the price that blew his mind, says Kurtzer. What hooked him was realizing that "many, many thousands of people [were] collaboratively working all over the world on a common software project… actually creating something of massive amounts of value." He became "enamored with open source in general, but Linux as a platform," and started looking for ways to contribute.<br>When he landed at the Department of Energy's Berkeley lab, the environment was standardized on Red Hat. He says he missed Debian's ecosystem and apt so much that he began asking why there was "no community around the Red Hat type ecosystem or the RPM-based ecosystem." The answer he kept hearing was that Red Hat owned that space. His answer was Caos [Community Assembled Operating System].<br>The idea was "to be basically a Debian-like alternative for RPM-based distributions of Linux." Caos used Red Hat as a base. "Glibc came out of Red Hat, for example, right, but we used the upstream kernel and then extended it with a community‑driven package universe." He formalized the effort as the Caos Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non‑profit.<br>Caos might have stayed a small Linux distro like so many others, but when Red Hat ended the classic Red Hat Linux line in favor of RHEL, it picked up steam. Kurtzer recalls that the community had grown up on free Red Hat Linux CDs, and the move landed badly: "Linux is a community project, it's freely available, and it should remain freely available, so a lot of people didn't like that notion at the time."<br>By then, there was already a Red Hat "rebuild" mailing list where multiple groups were experimenting with re‑compiling Red Hat's source packages into community distributions.uKurtzer tell is: "VA Linux was doing this, along with an HPC company called Atipa, which is where early CentOS developer Rocky McGaugh worked… and there were a few others."<br>Rocky, later immortalized in the name Rocky Linux, was part of that loose coalition, maintaining his own rebuilds. The list also included John Morris, who'd create White Box Enterprise Linux, and David Parsley, who would launch Tao Linux.<br>The first RHEL clone to break out wasn't CentOS; John Morris's White Box Enterprise Linux, not CAOS or CentOS, was first. "He released White Box Enterprise Linux, and Slashdot went crazy for it," Kurtzer remembered.<br>Sudden success became a burden. Morris "got way more visibility and attention and responsibility than… he was ready to take on" and didn't want to "take on the weight of the world in terms of infrastructure." The Caos folks, by contrast, already had build and mirror infrastructure: "we already have our own builders, we already have our own infrastructure… we were already ingesting packages from… Red Hat Linux [and] Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
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At a supercomputing conference… I was talking with a vendor… and I remember somebody came up next to me and interrupted the conversation to ask the vendor: 'Why don't they support CentOS?'
"So a couple members of the Caos team said, well, we're already kind of doing a lot of this… It's like, well, this actually makes sense, because we can then leverage those same binaries… and let's start this project, and so CentOS kind of came out of everything that was happening at...