A look at CentOS [LWN.net]

February 16, 2005

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

The CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) project has been thrust into the spotlight recently as a result of contact from Red Hat's lawyers regarding the use of trademarks. In reality, that's something of a non-story, since Red Hat is only asking the project to comply with Red Hat's trademark guidelines. Red Hat has enforced its trademarks before without destroying the GPL or stopping the distribution of Red Hat derivatives.

The CentOS team makes it very clear that the trademark issue is not a major obstacle, and is no threat to the future development of CentOS. But the brief flurry of press did bring our attention to the cAos (community assembled operating systems) Foundation and its CentOS and cAos Linux distributions. This writer has run into several admins who've chosen to go with CentOS as an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The CentOS distribution is compiled from source packages from "a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor." CentOS-3 is built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 sources, and CentOS-2 is built from RHEL 2. The project is working on CentOS 4 as well, but it is still in beta at the moment.

Installing and using CentOS is much (almost exactly) like using RHEL. There are some cosmetic differences, the CentOS logo and name replaces Red Hat's in most places -- though Red Hat is still given due credit in copyrights and so on -- and some changes in non-free packages. For the most part, though, CentOS seems to be an acceptable drop-in replacement for RHEL.

We also tested installing binary packages compiled for RHEL 3 on CentOS 3. We didn't run into any issues with packages compiled for RHEL 3 on CentOS 3 -- so CentOS seems to be suitable for users and organizations that want to use commercial products that support RHEL 3.

Support for CentOS is offered through forums, mailing lists, IRC channels and commercial organizations. We didn't approach any of the commercial organizations, but the CentOS community seems to be very helpful and responsive. The mailing lists, in particular, are fairly active. The February archive for CentOS 3 has 318 messages already, though some of the traffic is directly tied to the trademark issue.

Updates for CentOS are available via Yum repositories, which is a suitable replacement for the Red Hat Network as far as this writer is concerned. We did a little checking to see if the packages available from CentOS were up to date. After running "yum update" on CentOS 3 to get the latest packages, we checked against the Red Hat FTP repository for updates to RHEL 3. In each instance, we found that the CentOS packages were current, or at least as current as the packages on Red Hat's site.

The cAos Foundation is also distributing cAos Linux, not based on Red Hat's sources. The cAos Linux distribution is also RPM-based, but features its own Cinch installer, and a different design philosophy than CentOS. We did not spend much time with this distribution, but it does look like an interesting project for users who are looking for a community-driven RPM distribution with a long shelf-life. (The cAos page promises a 3-5 year life cycle, which is a bit more attractive for many users than the rapid development cycle for Fedora Core.)

Red Hat may have been better off leaving the trademark issue alone, since it seems that the project has garnered some attention it might not have received otherwise. After spending some time with CentOS, this writer sees little difference between Red Hat's official offerings and the CentOS offerings that are community-supported. Official support directly from Red Hat may be necessary for some organizations, but if that's not a requirement, the CentOS distribution may be a better choice.

(Log in to post comments)

A look at CentOS

Posted Feb 17, 2005 1:47 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]

The current tradmark debacle is what attracted my attention to CentOS. Since I switched from Slack all those years ago I have been pretty much in the RedHat camp. Not every machine justifies the RHEL investment though and I was tiring of the Fedora upgrade treadmill. I am very happy to have an alternative that feels like a member of the family.

I installed CentOS on an old IBM server and it seems excellent. It seems to be a truly faithful reproduction of RHEL. It even comes with all the RHEL bias. Fedora Core can handle other file systems as root but CentOS requires Ext3 it seems. I do not know about RHEL4 but CentOS 4.0beta includes apt-get which is excellent.

To me this illustrates the power of open source. It is simply amazing that a community can be built around the RHEL technology for a niche left unserved by RedHat's commercial activities. It is great to see products built with the best ideas from each effort.

I want to thank RedHat for making CentOS possible through their committment to Open Source and to the CentOS team for a great product. I hope that we can all continue to work together to our common benefit.

(Apologies to any PNALVs that take offense to the RHEL references)

A look at CentOS

Posted Feb 17, 2005 3:29 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I do not understand the last paragraph. First Red Hat has to protect its trademarks.. because in the end.. it is about the only thing they really own. Second, there is an implication that Red Hat doesnt want CentOS to get any attention...

When I worked at Red Hat, we would gladly tell a customer if Red Hat didnt meet their needs where they could get better support or product.. [hmmm that sounds worse than I meant it.] I recommended Slackware and Debian to customers who were really wanting what that product offered that Red Hat didnt. I would recommend CentOS to individuals who are looking for that kind of support and cost level. I would recommend Red Hat to people who want a different kind/level of support.

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 17, 2005 4:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

If this were only a case of Red Hat enforcing its trademarks, I would have no problem with their action at all. However, their lawyer asserted that Red Hat has the right to deny people the right to link to Red Hat's web site, despite several court decisions that say just the opposite. The exact quote from the lawyergram is "Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.". That's news to me; my company internal site has many links to Red Hat's sites, and we never asked for or obtained permission.

I wish Red Hat great financial success (so they can continue to pay lots of talented hackers to work on free software), but I can't tolerate people saying that you have to get permission to make a link. Ever. Red Hat should be asked to retract that statement (or blame the overzealous lawyer for going overboard, which may well be what happened).

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 17, 2005 10:07 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I agree with you, especially since they do not mention it in the
trademark guideline. In fact they seems to want to enforce a much
stricter policy than the one advertised, which is a double standard
(because obviously there are lots of instance when they _want_ to be
linked).

I hope RH will not become a lawyer-run corporation.

Linking...

Posted Feb 17, 2005 18:26 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]

I am hoping that this is just a misunderstanding either by the lawyer or those of us reading his statements out of context.

RedHat is clearly concerned about the context of the linking. They do not want you to say that your product is identical to RedHat but without the fees. I do not think that they are saying that you cannot link to their site for any reason. Many, many sites link to RedHat and this is the first I have heard of such a policy.

Perhaps the reason that CentOS is so happy to comply with RedHat is not only the risk of legal action but also empathy towards the hand that feeds it. Finding a way to allow a community reproduction of RHEL without signifcantly impacting RedHat's bottom line is in the interest of both parties. Without RedHat there is no CentOS.

If RedHat had suddenly become as malicious as some of the net postings imply I very much doubt that SRPMS for RHEL4 would still be available to everyone. I just updated my CentOS 4 system this morning with a slew of new updates and I know that I have RedHat to thank for that as much as the CentOS team.

Linking...

Posted Feb 18, 2005 20:07 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

RedHat is clearly concerned about the context of the linking. They do not want you to say that your product is identical to RedHat but without the fees.

Sure, they're concerned, and justifiably so. But the point is that trademark law doesn't give them any right to do anything about it. Trademark law stops me from saying that my product is Red Hat; it doesn't stop me from saying it's equivalent to Red Hat.

Unless the context reaches the level of libel, I can't see any legal way Red Hat can stop someone from referring to its web site. People once thought HTML linking might be a form of copying or encouraging copying, and therefore be controlled by copyright, but courts have said otherwise.

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 17, 2005 18:30 UTC (Thu) by kael (guest, #1599) [Link]

You forgot to mention Red Hat demanding "Red Hat" be removed from meta tags on the Centos site as well.

As a shareholder of Red Hat, I personally feel persuing this line of action against CentOS is a waste of time and money. Red Hat's value add is service and support, CentOS is certainly not offering the same class of offerings. Or so I believe with the very brief mention of commercial CentOS in the article (that would have been worth persuing).

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 18, 2005 5:57 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

It's not really about whether it's a waste of time, money or whatever. If Red Hat becomes aware of trademark violations, it _has_ to do something about it or risk losing its trademark altogether.