Rocky Linux
A free, community-run version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that runs on millions of servers.
Rocky Linux is a free operating system for servers, built to be a drop-in replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gregory Kurtzer started it in 2020 after Red Hat changed the direction of CentOS, the project he had founded years earlier, leaving thousands of organisations without the stable free option they had built on. He named it after an early CentOS collaborator who had died.
It matters here because it is a good example of open source infrastructure that most people never see but quietly rely on: research clusters, hosting providers and corporate data centres run on it, with the project reporting well over two million active installations. The same community-first playbook is what Kurtzer is now applying to AI training data with OpenWALDO.