When and why were the bylaws and charter written?

When we first began, our goal was to create a new Enterprise Linux derivative, addressing a critical pain point for the community. Now that we’ve done that, and built the infrastructure to facilitate a larger breadth of features and longevity of the project, we refocused to codify the organizational structure for the benefit of the new community which has formed around the vision of stable, collaborative, community focused open source projects.

We started thinking about this very early on, and as we progressed with building Rocky Linux, our ideas matured into a vision that is much bigger than just a free rebuild of RHEL. The initial drafts started in May 2022 and we worked on it until November 2022, when it was finalized and ratified.

We are very excited to bring this to the community as a testament of who we are, what we believe in, how we operate, and extend a tangible promise to the community who we openly ask to hold us accountable.