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Red Hat might have committed the biggest open source betrayal in Linux history. CentOS had been the backbone of enterprise Linux since 2004. Disney, Toyota, Verizon, GoDaddy. All running on it. All completely free. In December 2020, Red Hat announced CentOS 8 would die eight years earlier than promised. Gregory Kurtzer, the original co-founder of CentOS, was still watching. Hours after the announcement he committed to building a replacement. He named it after Rocky McGaugh, his CentOS co-founder who died in 2004 without ever seeing the project succeed. He called it Rocky Linux. Within two months Rocky Linux had 10,000 contributors. Within half a day of its first stable release, it was downloaded over 10,000 times. AWS backed the build infrastructure. Within a year it was running in production across the industry. Red Hat did not stop there. In 2023 they restricted access to RHEL's source code entirely, aiming directly at Rocky Linux and its rival AlmaLinux. Without the source, neither project could stay compatible. The community's response was bigger than one distro this time. Oracle, SUSE and Rocky's parent company CIQ formed an entirely new alliance called OpenELA specifically to keep enterprise Linux source code public. Their actual tagline: "No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome." Red Hat tried to kill CentOS once. The community rebuilt it. Red Hat tried to cut off the replacement. The community built an alliance to protect it. Some companies think open source means you can take it back whenever you want. The community keeps proving them wrong.