Red Hat and the CentOS Project today announced they are joining forces to build a new CentOS hoped to be capable of driving forward development and adoption of next-generation open source technologies.
The CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) Linux distribution is a stable and "reproduceable" platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with which it shares functional compatibility — also note that since March 2004, CentOS Linux has been a community-supported distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public.
Red Hat anticipates that taking a role as a catalyst within the CentOS community will enable it to accelerate development of enterprise-grade subscription solutions for customers and partners, such as (somewhat obviously) Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, … (but also) Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, OpenShift by Red Hat, and Red Hat Storage.
By taking an active role in the CentOS Project, Red Hat is hoping to help establish a platform well-suited to the needs of open source developers that integrate technologies in and around the operating system.
Since its initial release in 2004, the CentOS Project has grown to include a significant amount of focus on open source technology integration and a sizable user community.
"Red Hat and the CentOS Project recognize an opportunity to begin a new era by collaborating to expand the CentOS Project to address innovation, community contribution, and participation up the stack and beyond the operating system. By joining forces with the CentOS Project, Red Hat aims to accelerate community innovation, engagement, and momentum around open source cloud and infrastructure projects," said the company.
Red Hat will contribute its resources and expertise in building open source communities to the new CentOS Project to help establish more open project governance and a roadmap, broaden opportunities for participation, open pathways for contribution, and provide new ways for CentOS users and contributors to bring the power of open source innovation to all areas of the software stack.
With Red Hat's contributions and investment, the CentOS Project will be able to expand and accelerate, serving the needs of community members who require different or faster-moving components layered on top of CentOS, expanding on existing efforts to collaborate with open source projects such as OpenStack, RDO, Gluster, OpenShift Origin, and oVirt.
