With great excitement I’d like to announce that we are joining the Red Hat family. The CentOS Project is joining forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards team to foster rapid innovation beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies. Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we maintain the established base.
Well, that’s certainly a different tune from Red Hat. Welcome though!
I’ve been using CentOS since 2008, in the past I used Fedora for a postfix mail server. I’ve migrated a Windows NT 4.0 MS Exchange server(old version) to Fedora with Postfix from a simple tutorial from the web.
Fedora keep changing within 6 months, so I decided to install CentOS.
This is great news…
I don’t think to the end users anything will change, which is good. I guess we shall see.
Hmmm, that’s the main concern: is RedHat welcoming the CentOS dissidents just to kill off the shelve the free competition, open-source non-paying alternative ?
Kochise
So what is to stop you from taking the source RPM’s (After all they are GPL) and building your own distro and calling it KochiseOS and sticking a few dozen arrows in the back of RH?
Nothing stops anyone, but typically those who use centos is interested in having a server OS to use, not maintaining one themselves.
If CentOS would disappear as the free and less supported RHEL, then I think that some people would miss that.
That’s the spirit…
Kochise
As long as ScientificLinux is still out there, there’s a usable cross-migration path in case CentOS goes under.
The fact that it is a huge amount of effort and you have to de-brand stuff.
Even if yes, then we still got Scientific Linux
Kind of. Scientific OS doesn’t really care if its exactly compatible with RHEL. They just want a stable OS for the LHC. Which basically means they don’t care about compiling the source exactly the same way Red Hat does. Centos obsesses about that kind of thing.
One of the things that was good about Scientific Linux was that it had a major backer (CERN) compared to CentOS.
Remember one of the guys went AWOL for a bit and nobody else had admin access to key parts of the project.
EDIT: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/07/31/centos-project-lead-di…
Now it being managed by Redhat this won’t happen.
Edited 2014-01-08 18:52 UTC
Yeah, despite the name of Community ENTerprise OS (CENT OS), it wasn’t very community driven. Redhat aims to change that.
I think a lot of it was because they couldn’t (I believe it is in the mailing list announcement).
The code base is pretty much the same, different branding. That’s about it.
IMO The main difference between the two projects are their web presence, forums mainly. Scientific Linux has managed to outpace CENTOS in keeping up with RHEL release schedule, if anything. But that had more to do with personal issues with some of the members managing the CENTOS project at the time.
Edited 2014-01-09 02:00 UTC
Actually this should change something for end users, but for the better: no or shorter delay from a RHEL release to a CentOS release, faster updates following the upstream and such. Also, some CentOS developers are now paid full-time to work on their distro, so they can focus better on the job. Not last, there will be a faster network setup, so downloads will go smoother.
So does that mean:
CentOS -> RHEL Server
In a similar vein as:
Fedora -> RHEL Desktop
?
It means CentOS = LTS – support
RHEL = LTS + support
Fedora = releases between LTS
We can really thank Ubuntu for this.
Mark goes on making Linux better by accident.
Red Hat seems to understand the philosophical/psychological reasons for Ubuntu finally.
Now for a version of FedUp, CentUp anyone?
Technologically, Ubuntu has never been superior.
Edited 2014-01-08 06:16 UTC
Unity ? Mir ? *running away*
Kochise
You took the very words out of my mouth.
Unity and Canonicals ‘we must have a finger in every pie’ attitude is why a lot of former Ubuntu advocates have jumped ship to Mint, Debian or even CentOS.
Oh man the I probably am running Mint at this time without even knowing… oh wait, no I’m not. Still rolling with 12.04
Guess I’m not as hip as the other kids are.
Please continue bashing Canonical
Unity has gotten a lot better in the past couple of releases (as in, it’s actually fast and mostly stable now), and I find Ubuntu to be a somewhat useful OS nowadays. Despite that, I always end up back on Slackware for some reason. I guess I’m just old school, and I like the stability and reliability of the older OS. I also prefer Xfce to Unity even with the latter’s improvements, and Xubuntu is a major pain to deal with.
I am an advocate of Ubuntu, but I do not like Mint either. Though I will consider Debian. I am using CentOS for servers, and Ubuntu for desktops. Unity is slower now on 13.10 (with Atom processor) so I think I am going to replace it with CentOS 7 when available.
No Mint on my horizon.
Edited 2014-01-09 01:41 UTC
Mir isn’t even a thing. The problem ended up being a little more complicated than they thought, and it’s going to be more complicated when they figure out they need desktops too.
Unity is a buggy resource hog in its current rendition. It is really horrible to use, although unlike many I actually like the idea of a central place to search the many sites of interest – sort of a duckduckgo on my own system. The execution is just horrible though.
I think the many renditions of Gnome 3 really prove its versatility though. Looking at Deepin and realizing that is all the same technology as Fedora is amazing.
The best thing is Red Hat and friends are finally creating a unified modern system, the entire stack is being integrated to work together, and you can’t really complain because it isn’t being forced on you… thanks again Ubuntu!
It is exciting times in the Linux world.
You can still pay for support for Cent, however you’re getting the support from the CentOS group, not the RHEL group.
The biggest reason for RHEL support contracts, I’ve heard is their open source indemnification policy. Which is a fancy way of saying that if a patent troll sues you as a customer of RHEL for your use of RHEL, Red Hat will take the case for you, paying them off if its serious or taking it to court on your behalf.
Which can never happen.
Fedora being a bleeding edge distro that fed into RHEL predates Ubuntu’s existence. I’m not sure what you’re giving ubuntu credit for, exactly.
I think he meant that Canonical releases Ubuntu for both enterprise and community/home users.
Same version. The difference with RedHat is that CentOS – minus RedHat branding, now that they acquired CentOS, I don’t know if they are going to stuff CentOS with Powered by Redhat.
If you want support Call Redhat.
That is no longer should the community call CentOS group, but directly RedHat.
I think what you mean to say is that Ubuntu releases the same LTS version with paid support as they do without paid support.
And now Redhat will kind of be doing that as well.
In that sense, yes they are. But I think the real differentiation for Redhad is that RHEL – Fedora split. Its very different than the Ubuntu every two years a version becomes LTS. The looser coupling the redhat has allows technologies to mature more before they make it into RHEL, and it allows for more experimentation in Fedora.
I really don’t believe in accidents when speaking about end products, unless you talk about car accidents on the road. It happened by design. If not, we can just hire a bunch of idiots and wait for them to accidentally make the product better.
Long Term Support already existed before Canonical Ubuntu came in existence. For example, Fedora Legacy was that project supporting older version of Red Hat Linux and early Fedora Core release until its cease of operation due to the rise of CentOS itself derived from the first RHEL.
By making even more variants of CentOS RH will devalue each variant(along with Unbreakable and Scientific Linux).
Sure CentOS will be even more THE GO TO distro for people who want to build stuff and get a free lunch, BUT if you are some clueless IT decision maker at some firm all that CentOS stuff just got a lot more confusing and picking RHEL will be the even safer bet.
Red Hat cares only for their share holders, everyone who thinks otherwise needs to arrive IRL.
Variants are just like Fedora spins.
What it actually means is people will build stacks that interest you directly, giving you a means to get started more quickly.
This isn’t the same as Scientifix or Unbreakable because it isn’t a bunch of people working on something separate. It is a way to empower people in their particular area of interest.
If you can’t figure out which variant you want, you probably shouldn’t choose any, you probably shouldn’t be considering administration of a Linux box on your own at all.
The difference is, they contribute A LOT more to the Linux ecosystem in general than many other projects.
Sure, they (Red Hat) make a few bucks on the side, that’s why they’re a corporation to begin with! Which company DOESN’T do that? That’s the definition of a “business”!
This is a great move for all parties involved, regardless of what a vocal minority may think.
Edited 2014-01-08 18:54 UTC
Meh, do you even FUD bro?
This is the same strategy they’ve applied with the WildFly project, the difference being that WildFly started out as a RedHat project, while CentOS has been a community-driven fork.
I’m really glad to see this as the newer direction they’re taking.