Commentary A new hire from Rocky Linux creator CIQ is rocking the LTS Linux distro boat – by shining a spotlight on the elephant in the room (or one in the herd).

A recent blog post from Rocky Linux developer CIQ, titled Cracks in the Ice, examines "Why a 'frozen' Linux kernel distribution is not the safest choice for security." The post itself is a summary of a study the company conducted comparing the number of bugs and bug fixes in RHEL 8's kernel, which it has published in a white paper titled Vendor Kernels, Bugs and Stability.

FOSS software, which provides the building blocks of projects such as Linux distributions, is built around community development. The problem is that this is hard to monetize. Some companies have found ways to do this, but they don't share enough of their work, starving important parts of the ecosystem. There are clearly visible and fully feasible ways around this. The catch is that implementing them would mean persuading billion-dollar companies to play nice together.

The troublemaker behind the blog post is SAMBA co-founder (and regular Register commentator) Jeremy Allison, who recently got a new job at Rocky Linux developer CIQ, after being fired from Google last year, in a decision The Reg questioned at the time. . (It's not Allison's first such rodeo, as we reported way back in 2001 — when times are tough, even FOSS rockstar developers aren't safe.)