Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

RHEL uses such old kernel versions that I don't think this change will make much of a difference to most distributions other than those that are RHEL-based. For Centos it won't make any difference as they don't change the kernel package and I doubt Scientific Linux do either.

As long as Red Hat continue to work on the upstream kernel along with everyone else I don't see that this changes things for them or anyone else that matters.