Gregory Kurtzer
The open source veteran behind CentOS, Singularity and Rocky Linux, now working on open AI training data.
Gregory Kurtzer has spent about twenty five years starting open source projects that other people quietly ended up depending on. He founded CentOS, a free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that ran a huge slice of the world’s servers; Singularity, now Apptainer, which brought containers to scientific computing; and Warewulf, a cluster provisioning tool. When Red Hat changed CentOS in 2020, he started Rocky Linux as a replacement, and it now runs on millions of machines.
In August 2026 he turned that pattern towards AI by launching OpenWALDO, a community-governed corpus of training data. His company CIQ sponsors the project. His pitch each time has been roughly the same: find a gap that a community is better placed to fill than any single company, then build the boring infrastructure that makes it trustworthy.