Live Webinar
Thursday, June 8 | 1:00 P.M. EST
Live Webinar
Thursday, 8 June | 14:00 BST
The end of the CentOS era is just one year away: In June 2024, the last community supported version, CentOS 7, will reach end of life, joining CentOS 6 and CentOS 8. This looming deadline has many organizations looking into other Linux distributions that are viable for enterprise.
All the latest technologies, from cloud to containers and serverless, are being developed and deployed on Linux distributions. Two in particular — Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux — are gaining adoption rapidly; like CentOS, both are downstream rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Despite the relative newness of these projects, organizations of all sizes are migrating off CentOS to AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux because they are both supported by active open source communities and an increased number of enterprise sponsors.
About the Webinar
On June 8, a panel featuring leaders from AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux will sit down with Perforce’s Chief Open Source Evangelist Javier Perez to talk about the impact to the Linux landscape after all versions of CentOS are EOL. They will discuss many topics including:
- History and evolution of the Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux projects
- What motivates organizations to sponsor open source projects like Alma and Rocky
- Latest developments in the Linux ecosystem, including new releases, updates, migrations between versions, and trends
- Challenges with maintaining an open source project that comes from RHEL
- And more!

Javier Perez
Passionate about technology and open source software, Javier is the Chief Open Source Evangelist and Senior Director of Product Management at Perforce Software. He is responsible for technical thought leadership and advocacy for open source software while driving the OpenLogic by Perforce offering. Javier has been in the application development, open source, cloud, app security, AI, SaaS, and mobile industries for 25+ years. As a speaker and blogger, he has had the opportunity to present at industry events all over the world. Javier holds an honors degree in Computer Systems and an MBA.

benny Vasquez
As an adaptable woman with over 20 years of experience in management, technical support, brand management, community, and developer relations, benny knows that her passion is service. She finds joy in bettering anything she touches, whether that's a team, a product, a presentation, or a brand. benny has worked as an individual contributor, managed teams of varied ages and experiences, and built programs from the ground up. Each position she loves further develops her leadership skills and nourishes her open-source soul, all while ensuring she gets to find and empower the next generation of community builders. Currently, benny is the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board of Directors.

Gregory M. Kurtzer
Gregory M. Kurtzer is a 20+ year veteran in Linux, open source, and high performance computing. He is well known in the HPC space for designing scalable and easy to manage secure architectures for innovative performance-intensive computing while working for the U.S. Department of Energy with a joint appointment to UC Berkeley. Greg founded, co-founded, and led several large open source projects such as CentOS Linux, the Warewulf and Perceus cluster toolkits, the container system Singularity (now renamed to Apptainer), and most recently, the successor to CentOS, Rocky Linux. He is currently serving as President and Chairman of the Board of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) and is the CEO of CIQ.