Rocky Linux was announced in December 2020 by Gregory Kurtzer, a co-founder of CentOS, within hours of Red Hat saying CentOS Linux 8 would end early. It is named after the late CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh. The project is governed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and the company CIQ provides commercial support.
Rocky aims to be a drop-in, bug-for-bug compatible replacement for RHEL. Each major version follows RHEL’s ten-year life cycle, and the migrate2rocky script converts existing CentOS installations in place. Since Red Hat restricted RHEL source access in 2023, Rocky has rebuilt from other public sources and works with Oracle and SUSE through OpenELA.