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. 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. 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. "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. 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. 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]. 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. 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." 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." 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. 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. 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." "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 the time." Then the Red Hat clones were more collaborative than competitive: "We were generally all very collaborative… we were all kind of on the same IRC list, so when any of us had a bug on rebuilding a package or issue, we all kind of worked together." Where Caos had an edge was scale. "We actually had a number of people already associated with it. We already had a critical mass… so it was not that big of a lift for us to properly support this," Kurtzer says. Parsley ultimately "ran Tao Linux… for quite a while before finally retiring the project, and then telling his users basically to go… over to CentOS," complete with a "nice transition plan." White Box and Tao quietly funneled users and expectations into the emerging CentOS brand. Even the version numbers reflect CentOS's pragmatic roots. "CentOS 3 was developed almost completely by Rocky," Kurtzer adds. "We started CentOS version 3 before version 2, and there was never a 1, right, because… There was never a version 1 of RHEL either." CentOS 3 arrived on stage on March 19, 2004. The community went where the demand was. "We identified that the first and most pressing need was around version 3, so Rocky started with version 3. That focus, combined with Caos's infrastructure and the consolidation of smaller rebuilds, turned CentOS into the RHEL clone that stuck." For its early life, CentOS lived under the Caos Foundation umbrella. By the CentOS 4 timeframe, in 2005, the projects split. Kurtzer says, "At about the release of… CentOS four… the CentOS project left the Caos Foundation, and it moved on… and we kind of ended up going different directions." He ceded control. "I was no longer the project lead of CentOS at that point, so it was taken over by a guy named Lance Davis," he tells The Reg. Caos continued until around 2007–2008, including a "Node Server Appliance" variant focused on "lightweight high-performance computing systems," but the market was voting with its feet. "Most people wanted the compatibility… that one-to-one compatibility… was incredibly important," he says. CentOS became the canonical RHEL clone; Caos faded into history. How CentOS simply had to exist From the outside, CentOS often gets cast as Red Hat's free rival. Kurtzer sees it differently. Red Hat's subscription model, he contends, practically required something like CentOS to exist. "This choice in the business model has made it very difficult for organizations, and so this is the whole reason why… There was even a need for CentOS," he says. Kurtzer explains that enterprises evolved a two‑tier pattern. "Organizations started running a bisected environment where they ran CentOS on the majority of it, and then they ran Red Hat on a sliver of it, where they needed the most support, where they needed validation, where they needed to know that it's going to work." Without CentOS, he bluntly says: "I believe that most organizations probably would have gone to a Debian and Ubuntu model because nobody's going to pay for support… across their whole environment for a free product." Running Debian or Ubuntu everywhere and RHEL on a small slice doesn't work well, he argues, because "it's an incompatible operating system, so the tooling would be different depending on what side of the infrastructure that they're looking at." With CentOS, they could "run the free product where they can and then only pay for the support where they need to." His conclusion: "I actually truly believe CentOS was very helpful to RHEL overall, given the choice of that particular business model." Asked when CentOS stopped being a niche rebuild and became a default choice, Kurtzer points to a supercomputing conference in Phoenix in the mid-2000s. "I remember being at a supercomputing conference… and 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?'" It was a turning point. "This is the first time I actually even heard somebody outside of my circle of people actually now start demanding CentOS… and it was somebody I didn't know, and I'm just kind of like, 'wow, that was kind of cool.'" Around the same time, Kurtzer says he and early collaborators met IBM executives there to pitch Caos and CentOS. "Interestingly enough, there was no interest at the time. Another metric of success was seeing technology appear on resumes and in job descriptions. By the mid‑2000s, CentOS was on its way to being more popular than RHEL." By the early 2010s, CentOS was everywhere, but still maintained by a small, unpaid team. When Red Hat moved to sponsor the project in 2014, some read it as a hostile capture. Kurtzer didn't. "The CentOS team was fairly small at this point… and the developers were basically doing heroic feats for the entire community, and not being paid for it." Some things never change in open source, do they? Kurtzer says he thought the deal was fair. "They're giving up their home lives and whatnot… and there were companies out there that were doing very well, basing their infrastructure on it, but also making a ton of money on that, so I thought that this was a really fair option for them to now get hired by Red Hat… and now get paid, and now be… not having to give up their home life." Vendors began calling to ask if CentOS was going away and whether he'd recreate it. "I even had two people from fairly large companies at fairly high rankings… basically say, 'Greg, do you want to recreate CentOS?' And I said, 'no… let's give Red Hat… the benefit of the doubt… and see what happens,'" he recalls. For years, he thinks, Red Hat did "a phenomenal job": release latency improved, documentation and community interaction got better. That's why the CentOS 8/CentOS Stream pivot in 2021 hit so hard. Kurtzer thinks that Red Hat's messaging "was just a complete cluster… nobody, including the people at Red Hat, really knew what they were saying." The community's "general consensus at the time was that CentOS is end of life, and there's this new thing that's replacing it, which is some rolling beta." The blog post announcing the change "got more press… and more comments than any other blog that Red Hat has ever posted… mostly people in the community yelling at Red Hat," and "it was… nasty." By then, Kurtzer was running CIQ, a young high-performance computing (HPC) company building a computing platform on CentOS. They had already asked themselves what would happen if "something happens to CentOS." Their answer was to be ready to help rebuild a RHEL‑compatible distro if needed. Within two hours of the CentOS blog going live, as comments piled up, Kurtzer says, he replied publicly: "Hi everybody, I'm… original founder of CentOS. I'm going to go… recreate CentOS, and I'm hanging out over in this Slack over here… and if anybody wants to join me, I'll be hanging over there, kind of thinking about how to do this." The response was immediate. "Within four to six weeks, we had over 10,000 people join… it took off," he says. The free tier of Slack couldn't cope, "that 10,000 message limit goes in a matter of hours," but it was enough to bootstrap a new community. Teams coalesced around release engineering, testing, development, branding, web work, and even merchandise. "We had T‑shirts, swags, and memorabilia that you can get before we had any code," he laughs. Early shirts read "Rocky Linux" with "early supporter" in brackets underneath. Rocky Linux wasn't the only successor; AlmaLinux and others joined the field, and the usual distro tribalism followed. Kurtzer compares it to sports rivalries: "We just do it around our Linux distribution choices," he says. But he insists the diversity is healthy. "If something happens to Alma, Rocky's here; if something happens to Rocky, Alma is there; if something happens to both of us, Oracle is there; and we have all of these other options to guarantee the stability in the ecosystem." That may be CentOS's real legacy. It proved that a community could rebuild an enterprise OS from source and sustain it long enough for enterprises to standardize on it, and that doing so could actually reinforce, not undermine, the commercial platform it tracked. The clones that followed, from Scientific Linux to Rocky and Alma, are part of the same lineage that began when a few people on a rebuild mailing list decided that Red Hat's sources shouldn't just sit on a server; they should become a truly community Linux again. ®

Het Nederlandse hybride werken is een succesverhaal geworden. Zes op de tien werknemers voelt zich thuis productiever, ruim driekwart ervaart minder werkstress en 82 procent ziet thuiswerken inmiddels als een belangrijke arbeidsvoorwaarde, blijkt uit recent CNV-onderzoek onder 1.200 werknemers. Nederland is wereldwijd koploper: meer dan de helft van de beroepsbevolking werkt deels vanuit huis, en PwC concludeert dat hybride werken ons land niet armer maakt en de betrokken werknemers gelukkiger.

Maar er groeit een tweede verhaal naast dit succes. Een verhaal dat zich niet afspeelt in kwartaalcijfers of medewerkersenquêtes, maar in onderrug, nekspieren en bloedvaten. En de cijfers daarover beginnen ongemakkelijk te worden.

2.564 stappen per dag minder

De grootste recente meta-analyse over dit onderwerp, gepubliceerd in BMC Public Health, bundelde tientallen studies onder ruim 270.000 werknemers. De conclusie is hard: wie thuiswerkt, zit gemiddeld 31 minuten per dag langer stil en zet 2.564 stappen minder dan op een kantoordag. Dat verschil is geen rondje minder rond de koffieautomaat — het is ongeveer twee kilometer minder beweging, elke werkdag.

Een eerder systematisch review becijferde de totale fysieke activiteit van thuiswerkers zelfs 34,7 procent lager dan die van collega's op kantoor. De woon-werkfiets, het looprondje naar de vergaderzaal, de trap naar de kantine: kleine bewegingen die optellen tot iets groots, en die in de thuissituatie grotendeels verdampen.

Het lichaam stuurt de rekening

De fysieke gevolgen blijven niet uit. Uit cijfers van TNO, gepresenteerd in factsheets van het Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, blijkt dat 59 procent van alle Nederlandse werknemers klachten heeft aan het bewegingsapparaat. 43 procent kampt specifiek met arm-, nek- en schouderklachten. Sinds de pandemie is het percentage werknemers dat acht uur of langer per dag achter een beeldscherm zit gestegen van 18 naar 25 procent — en die stijging zakt niet meer weg.

De Nederlander zit inmiddels gemiddeld 8,7 uur per dag, een hoeveelheid die het Ministerie expliciet "niet gezond" noemt vanwege het verhoogde risico op hart- en vaatziekten. Internationaal onderzoek bevestigt het patroon: ongeveer 61 procent van de thuiswerkers rapporteert nieuwe of verergerde musculoskeletale klachten sinds de overstap naar thuiswerken, en een aparte studie vond dat 41 procent van de thuiswerkers lage rugpijn ervaart en 23,5 procent nekpijn, aldus Biolife Health.

In Nederlandse huisartsenpraktijken vertaalt zich dat in indrukwekkende aantallen. In 2024 waren ruim 1,8 miljoen mensen bij de huisarts bekend met nek- en rugklachten, blijkt uit cijfers van Volksgezondheid en Zorg. Ongeveer 825.600 van hen hebben langdurige of chronische klachten — een aantal dat sinds 2011 gestaag stijgt.

Niet alleen kommer en kwel

Toch is het beeld niet eenduidig somber. Een Nederlands-internationale studie onder 143 kantoormedewerkers volgde thuiswerkers een jaar lang en zag juist een afname van nek- en rugpijn ten opzichte van de uitgangsmeting. De cruciale factor: wie meer stond tijdens het werken, had aantoonbaar minder nekklachten. Zittijd alléén bleek geen statistisch significante voorspeller van pijn.

Dat sluit aan bij wat onderzoeksbureau Maintel eerder al vaststelde: thuiswerken kan productief én gezond zijn, maar alleen als de werkplek goed is gefaciliteerd. Daar wringt nu juist de schoen. Veel Nederlanders werken nog steeds aan de keukentafel, op een eetkamerstoel, met een laptop op ooghoogte van het tafelblad in plaats van de ogen.

Wat werkgevers (eindelijk) moeten doen

Vanaf 2026 stellen werkgevers, blijkt uit onderzoek van AWVN, steeds meer eisen aan thuiswerken: 78 procent verplicht medewerkers inmiddels een aantal dagen op kantoor te verschijnen. Maar de andere kant van die medaille — de Arbo-verantwoordelijkheid voor de thuiswerkplek — krijgt veel minder aandacht. Een ergonomische stoel, een tweede scherm, een zit-stabureau en periodieke ergocoaching zijn geen luxe meer. Ze zijn, gezien de cijfers, het minimum.

PM secured re-election despite devastating military defeat to Azerbaijan and political and economic pressure from Moscow

For most candidates, campaigning on the loss of an ancestral homeland and advocating reconciliation with a longtime enemy would amount to political suicide. Not in Armenia.

On Sunday, the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, secured re-election in the Caucasus nation of 3 million people, despite having led Armenia through a devastating military defeat to Azerbaijan just three years ago.

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From ludicrously fun 80s love affairs to outrageously scandalous drama, this has already been a year of great television. Here are our favourite shows of the year

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Every deal in the NWSL, WSL, Liga F, Frauen-Bundesliga, Première Ligue and Serie A Femminile as well as a club-by-club guide

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If you’re in a rut, kids can show you the way out. That’s the latest message from the author of the bestselling Steal Like an Artist. I asked him to help me rediscover my playful, creative side …

As a child, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I’d spend hours daydreaming about the future, my exciting life and what I’d do with all that autonomy, such as own exotic pets, paint my walls bright pink and stay up all night.

Now that I’m in my mid-30s, it’s fair to say that adulthood has somewhat lost its lustre. Nothing is wrong, exactly – I’ve even achieved some of my dreams, with a bright pink bathroom and two weird cats – but there’s still a sense of going through the motions, and my days being dully predictable: gym, work, cook, clean, collapse on to the sofa.

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Like many couples, my husband and I bickered over who would do what and who did more. We came up with a radical solution

It was when my second child was born in 2021 that I realised I needed a new system for parenting. We were coming out of lockdown, and I was tired and overwhelmed. During the pandemic, my husband and I had built our own mini unit in the UK, as our families lived in the US. I had decided to start my own literary agency as soon as my daughter was old enough to start nursery at six months. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I wanted to start as soon as possible.

I approached finding a parenting system the way I think many women of my generation do, with the same intensity that we would have approached a school dissertation. I decided to crowdsource my research: I watched videos of home-schooling mums in the US demonstrating their morning routines, I read every parenting book I could, I listened to podcasters interviewing mothers who seemingly “had it all”, and listened to others who argued that “having it all” was impossible.

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As a former NBA player, I know that criticism is part of the game. But in an age when players are under attack constantly, the Knick star is an example to us all

The entire basketball world is singing the praises of Jalen Brunson and rightfully so. He has led the Knicks to the NBA finals for the first time since 1999 and has united the entire city of New York in a unique way.

On every New York street you can see people of every race, color, creed, nationality, religion, economic status and political affiliation unified in excitement as the team seek their first NBA title since 1973. While older Knicks fans break out their Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and John Starks jerseys, younger fans have the names of Brunson, Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns on their backs. Chants of “MVP!” fill the air in every New York borough every time Jalen Brunson steps up to the free-throw line. Knicks fans have staged watch parties on the sidewalks, in the parks, and on the corners. All of New York is, in the words of JadaKiss, “outside”.

Etan Thomas played in the NBA from 2000 through 2011. He is a published author, podcaster, poet, activist and motivational speaker.

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De Nederlander kan wel zoveel willen, en als de asielmigratie niet omlaag wordt gebracht door onwil bij politici en totale idiotie in de Eerste Kamer, dan verzet het volk de doelpalen en hoopt het maar dat een maximum op arbeidsmigratie de gezellige drukte in dit land - anderen spreken wellicht van demografische vervanging - remt. Volgens cijfers van het CBS wil 68% van de Nederlanders zo'n maximum op de instroom van arbeidsmigranten. Tegelijkertijd vindt 75% dat arbeidsmigranten onmisbaar zijn om personeelstekorten (zorg, onderwijs, horeca, politie (al die Poolse agenten!) en bouw) op te lossen en wil een derde niet dat ze na afloop van hun contract in Nederland blijven. Maar het mooie is: het maakt allemaal helegaar geen mallemoer uit, want er zit momenteel een kwebbelkabinet dat uitblinkt in nietsdoen. En ondertussen moddert de asielmigratie voort, moddert de arbeidsmigratie voort, moddert Ron Fresen voort, is er over sommige groepen soms best positief nieuws, is er over sommige groepen soms best negatief nieuws (of niet soms) en heten we in 2050 allemaal Ali. Het gaat slecht, maar verder gelukkig goed.

Op de Rozenlaan in Spijkenisse is maandagochtend een ernstig ongeluk gebeurd met een auto. Het voertuig raakte een paaltje en een betonnen muur. Door het ongeluk ligt de weg vol met brokstukken en is het motorblok uit de auto gerukt, de bestuurder is naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.