The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) has published its charter and bylaws, documenting the organization’s governing structure and rules for hosting open source projects, including its namesake project, Rocky Linux. The charter and bylaws also describe the RESF vision to create and nurture a community of individuals and organizations that are committed to ensuring the longevity, stewardship and innovation of enterprise-grade open source software that is always freely available.

Adopted on November 9, the new RESF charter and bylaws were voted on by the initial charter member group of 30 RESF and Rocky Linux contributors. The vote was procedurally ratified by Gregory Kurtzer, who filed the original paperwork to establish the RESF as a Delaware Public Benefits Corporation (PBC). By ratifying the new bylaws and charter, Kurtzer legally has turned over the control of the RESF to the structure defined within those documents, a structure designed to ensure community control while specifically enabling enterprise use-cases and the participation of vendors and other commercial entities.

Kurtzer co-founded and once led the former open-source project CentOS Linux, a popular bug-for-bug-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat ultimately acquired CentOS, officially absorbing it in 2014 and announcing its end of life in 2020. Hours after the announcement, Kurtzer announced a CentOS replacement project which then became the Rocky Linux project with the objective of creating an open source, community-led, production-ready downstream version of RHEL that could never be controlled by a single corporate entity or individual.

Although avoiding singular corporate control is integral to the governing principles of RESF, the foundation’s charter and bylaws encourage corporate involvement and aim to support the needs of commercial organizations, professional IT teams and the community at large.

Read the full charter and bylaws of the RESF here.