This, stated as you did, is not true. There is no planned requirement for Roon to be run on ROCK. In fact, ROCK doesn’t even make sense as it is our free DIY distribution of Roon OS, and our even our own product Nucleus does not run ROCK; it runs a slightly different version of Roon OS.
If you alter “ROCK” to be “Roon OS”, it also is not true. We have no plans to deprecate the Linux/MacOS/Windows options.
All that said, the article (which a photo of is shown above) does not state either. It makes a claim that “all Roon Server partners will be required to run ROCK”. This is also false, as we explicitly do not allow partners to redistribute ROCK. Some manufacturers do it anyway, but it is against our software distribution policy. They are not our partners (nor our friends).
We killed the “Roon Core” partner program years ago. It was a soft program, with no certifications or endorsements. We basically allowed some manufacturers to redistribute the RoonServer software for Linux on their machines.
For years now, this granting of access to redistribute RoonServer has been denied to all newly inquiring manufacturers. It was nothing but pain for our support team, and while many end-users have been happy, our largest group of complaints also come from buyers of third-party servers. Innuos and a handful of others are from before the killing of the program.
One exception to this was Merging Technologies, which ships a customized version of Roon OS (they add Ravenna support) on their NADAC+PLAYER. Those machines are stable, fast, sound great.
Recently, we have decided to allow others to also ship Roon OS in a manner that is more fitting proper certification, including having our teams sign off on the integration and have the physical products in-home for support purposes. This should bring up the quality of the experience to the levels you see from Roon Ready partners.