CentOS and Red Hat team up

In something of a surprise, Red Hat and CentOS announced a partnership on January 7. CentOS has long been a path for folks to try out Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which CentOS rebuilds and rebrands, and some of those who try CentOS may become Red Hat customers. That turns CentOS into something of a RHEL on-ramp for some portion of its users. While the announcement seemed to come a bit out of left field, it actually makes quite a bit of sense for both organizations and will likely benefit Fedora as well.

CentOS came about as the "Community Enterprise Operating System" in 2003 or so. In 2005, it ran afoul of Red Hat's legal department over its use of Red Hat trademarks on its then-new web site. That dispute was eventually patched up, though not without CentOS resorting to referring to Red Hat as a PNAELV (Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor) for a time. Since then, CentOS and Red Hat have more or less happily coexisted. Now, it seems, there will be more than just coexistence.

Both CentOS and Red Hat put out their own announcement of the partnership, each in their own style. CentOS's was characteristically chatty, while Red Hat's was more "corporate". Both organizations see CentOS filling a niche in between the buttoned-down RHEL server distribution and the fast-developing, more experimental Fedora.

Another significant piece of the puzzle is that several of the main CentOS contributors are now Red Hat employees: Johnny Hughes Jr, Jim Perrin, Fabian Arrotin, and Karanbir Singh. They will be working on CentOS full time in the Open Source and Standards group. Beyond that, there is a new governing board (currently nine members) made up of existing core CentOS contributors, one community-nominated member (Arrotin), as well as three Red-Hat-appointed members. The board is now dominated by Red Hat employees—and it will always be a majority-Red-Hat board—but the governance goal for the project is to be "public, open, and inclusive", Singh said in the CentOS announcement.

Singh goes on to list several things that won't be changing as a result of the partnership, as well as some things that will. For the most part, the nuts and bolts of how CentOS operates today, how it is built and distributed, and its isolation from the internals of RHEL development, all will remain the same. Beyond just jobs, Red Hat will be providing more resources for build and delivery systems, access to the Red Hat legal team (which will help remove some of the barriers to community participation in QA, for example), and support for CentOS variants.

These variants seem to be one of the key new plans going forward. Somewhat akin to Fedora spins, CentOS variants will pair the long-lived CentOS base with a faster moving "enterprise-y" project like Gluster, OpenStack, OpenShift, oVirt, etc. to provide a stable platform for those kinds of projects. Given the development speed of those projects, there is currently an impedance mismatch with both RHEL (which moves far too slowly) and Fedora (which moves too quickly and tends to be more experimental in nature). The recent Xen4CentOS project should provide something of a template for variants.

The ownership of the CentOS trademarks, along with the requirement that the board have a majority of Red Hat employees makes it clear that, for all the talk of partnership and joining forces, this is really an acquisition by Red Hat. The CentOS project will live on, but as a subsidiary of Red Hat—much as Fedora is today. Some will disagree, but most would agree that Red Hat's stewardship of Fedora has been quite good over the years; one expects its treatment of CentOS will be similar. Like with Fedora, though, some (perhaps large) part of the development of the distribution will be directed by Red Hat, possibly in directions others in the CentOS community are not particularly interested in.

There are a number of advantages for Red Hat that are outlined in its FAQ about the partnership. Largely it boils down to filling the hole between RHEL and Fedora. CentOS was already doing that job, but with Red Hat's help it can do it better.

The git.centos.org repository is one area where Red Hat's assistance will be felt. Instead of relying on source RPMs, there will soon be an official Git repository for all of CentOS and its variants. That will presumably allow for easier access to Red Hat's patches for the kernel and other packages, which will not only help CentOS, but will be a boon to other rebranded RHELs like Scientific Linux. The fact that it may also help Oracle (which was one reason for Red Hat's switch to releasing kernel tarballs rather than patches) has evidently been discounted.

For Fedora, very little should change, which is the theme of project leader Robyn Bergeron's blog post. There are some obvious places where CentOS and Fedora could work more closely, she said, and those will be explored: "I would expect that over time, the things that make sense to collaborate on will become more obvious, and that teams from the two respective communities will gravitate towards one another when it makes sense." She also extended a welcome to the CentOS developer and user communities including, of course, her new coworkers.

As with any newly announced initiative, it will take some time—quite possibly a year or two—to see the effects of CentOS being absorbed into the Red Hat family. Even then, the full effects may take more time to be recognized. It is ten years since the RHEL/Fedora split and it often seems like the effects of that are still being discovered at times. CentOS + Red Hat certainly appears to be a good move for all involved, but we will have to check back in periodically over the coming years to be sure.