Red Hat and the CentOS Project
When development groups put aside their differences and work together, we all benefit.
The popular CentOS distro – and the team behind it – is officially joining the Red Hat family, which includes the Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distros. Whilst CentOS was already closely tied with Red Hat’s projects – its based on the RHEL source code – until now, there was no official relationship between the two projects. Instead, it was viewed by some as a mutually beneficial arrangement, where enterprise users would begin with the free CentOS before moving to using RHEL for their business.
One of the main aims of the new partnership is to drive forward development and adoption of open source technologies, whilst broadening the Red Hat development ecosystem. Brian Stevens, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat, said: “It is core to our beliefs that when people who share goals or problems are free to connect and work together, their pooled innovations can change the world. We believe the open source development process produces better code, and a community of users creates an audience that makes code impactful.”
Tweaks have been made to Red Hat’s business model to accommodate CentOS, with three tiers of products. Fedora will be for personal and home use, CentOS for business use with free community support, and RHEL for table business use with enterprise support. Whilst the benefits are clear for Red Hat’s business model, what differences will we see in CentOS? There is talk that a new CentOS will be built, with core team members of CentOS taking roles at Red Hat. CentOS will be sponsored by Red Hat in a similar manner to the Fedora project, so new technologies will be developed and tested in CentOS before being included in the commercial RHEL distribution. On the new CentOS website ( www.centos.org), it says: “the purpose of a variant edition is to allow another open source project to more effectively use CentOS as a base platform for running on and inside of.
“Some open source projects need different software components to run properly, such as updated development languages or kernel functionality. By being able to get these components directly in CentOS, a variant maintainer solves many of the steps for users. The end goal is to make it easier for users to run different open source software directly on and in CentOS itself”.
In a message to the community, CentOS project leader Karanbir Singh, says: “Some of the key things that are changing: Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL. This should not have any impact to our ability to do what we have done in the past, it should facilitate a more rapid pace of development and evolution for our work on the community platform. Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial content delivery resources [and] because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind closed doors now go away, and we hope to have the entire build, test, and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.
“The CentOS Linux platform isn’t changing. The process and methods built up around the platform, however, are going to become more open, inclusive and transparent. The sponsor driven content network that has been central to the success of CentOS stays in tact. The bugs, issues and incident handling process stays as it has been with more opportunities for community members to get involved. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain. Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated from the RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm/source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. We retain an upstream”.
Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk, said: “Though it will doubtless come as a surprise, this move represents the logical embrace of an adjacent ecosystem.”
“Until now, there was no official relationship between the projects.”