CentOS joins forces with Red Hat

The developers of the CentOS Linux distribution announced that from this point on the CentOS Project will go under the wing of the Red Hat company. For CentOS users, this will not lead to any changes, so don't worry. The next release will be released according to plan .

Changes will occur only in the organizational structure. First, the leading CentOS developers are now included in the Red Hat staff and will receive a salary there, continuing to work on CentOS, but not on RHEL. Secondly, the CentOS Governing Board begins to operate , consisting of five CentOS developers and four Red Hat representatives.

CentOS is one of the most popular Linux distributions on web servers. In 2010-2012, he was generally in the first place, which was then conceded to Debian. This distribution was created nine years ago as a free alternative to the commercial distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while providing almost 100% binary compatibility with it. From it only removed the Red Hat logos.

RHEL in the form of disks with binary packages is available only for paid subscribers. But at the same time the company is obliged to publish the source code. It is from them that “free RHEL” is compiled, that is, CentOS.
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If you believe the CentOS developers, nothing will change in the future. Quite the contrary, they promise a more intensive development of the project (a new repository git.centos.org has been opened). They promise the “public, open and non-discriminatory” work of the Governing Council, and indeed some previously closed discussions like CentOS-QA will now be open.

Four CentOS key developers are moving to work at Red Hat. They will join the Red Hat Open Source and Standards group. All of them are on the board of governors, so 8 of its 9 members are now employees of Red Hat. According to the statute, the council can consist of a maximum of 11 people, with more than half of them working in Red Hat.