On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that they would discontinue development of CentOS, which had been a production-ready downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favor of a newer upstream development variant of that operating system known as "CentOS Stream".[6] In response, original founder of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, announced that he would again start a project to achieve the original goals of CentOS.[7][8][9] Its name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh.[5] By December 12, the code repository[10] of Rocky Linux had become the top-trending repository on GitHub.[11]