Guest: Brady Dibble
Company: CIQ
Show: The Agentic Enterprise
Topic: AI Infrastructure

The enterprise Linux model was built for a different era. Two decades later, platform teams are paying for compliance modules, long-term support, and security features that should never have been line items in the first place. As AI workloads and hybrid cloud architectures redefine what enterprises need from their operating systems, the commercial models powering them have barely changed, and the bill keeps growing.

Brady Dibble, Director of Product for Enterprise Linux at CIQ, sat down with TFiR to unpack why that model is failing modern infrastructure teams, and what CIQ is doing differently with RLC Pro.

From Free Puppy to Eye-Watering Invoice

The story of enterprise Linux pricing is one of incremental monetization. What started as open source with support contracts evolved into per-node licensing, then expanded into a growing catalog of add-ons, variants, and premium tiers. Dibble puts it plainly: “You get charged for an extra bag, food, things that previously were free. It’s very good for shareholders, but for the customer, your bill ends up being eye watering.”

The deeper problem is not just cost; it is complexity. Enterprises end up running different operating systems across development, staging, and production environments just to manage spend, which creates the very fragmentation that slows down AI and cloud workloads.

One SKU, No Surprises

CIQ’s answer is RLC Pro, a single-SKU enterprise Linux product built on Rocky Linux that includes long-term support, FIPS-certified modules, SBOM, CVE remediation, and DISA STIG security profiles out of the box. No menu. No add-ons.

“We wanted to simplify it and go back to basics,” Dibble explains. “You get one SKU and you get everything you need. Long-term support is included, FIPS certification modules are included, bug fixes are included. You don’t have to look across a complicated menu.”

For teams already running Rocky Linux Community Edition, the migration path is intentionally frictionless. Because RLC Pro is binary compatible with Rocky Linux, transitioning requires nothing more than authenticating to CIQ’s repositories and running a DNF update. No reinstall. No migration project.

Built for AI Workloads at Scale

Where RLC Pro stands apart most clearly is in its handling of AI and HPC infrastructure. Traditional enterprise Linux kernels are frozen in time by design, which creates a real trade-off: stability versus access to the hardware features and driver support that modern AI workloads demand.

CIQ resolves this with RLC Pro AI, a coming variant that pairs upstream kernel support with the stability of the Enterprise Linux user space. The result is a pre-validated stack that includes PyTorch, TensorFlow, and the full NVIDIA driver suite, managed and signed by CIQ. “We’re marrying those two together in one package,” Dibble says. “A turnkey gold image you can get up and running with AI out of the box.”

Hardened From the Start

For enterprises in regulated industries or government-adjacent environments, CIQ offers RLC Hardened, a variant that ships pre-configured for DISA STIG, CIS, PCI-DSS, FIPS 140-3, FedRAMP, and Common Criteria compliance. It also includes proactive security tooling, such as LKRG for rootkit prevention, led by Solar Designer, founder of the Openwall security project.

The emphasis on preventative hardening is deliberate. “Especially in the age of AI, where any exploit is going to be attacked immediately, you need to start being serious about proactive and preventative hardening,” Dibble notes.

Sovereignty as a Default

With geopolitical pressures reshaping enterprise infrastructure decisions, data sovereignty has moved from a niche concern to a boardroom priority. CIQ’s approach is to design for it from the ground up. RLC Pro runs in fully air-gapped environments, collects no telemetry beyond repository pull requests, publishes all source code openly on GitHub, and provides SBOMs for every artifact shipped.

The message to enterprises evaluating their Linux strategy is clear: modern infrastructure requires a commercial model built for it. CIQ is betting that simplicity, transparency, and a single SKU that actually includes what teams need will be a compelling alternative to the status quo.