Red Hat Finally Adopts CentOS, Brings Legitimacy To Enterprise Open Source

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a wonderful operating system for commercial users. However, there is one major downside to it — it costs money. Luckily, Red Hat provides the source code to the open-source community. This enables groups to use the code to build their own free distributions, such as CentOS. While these distributions are just as functional as RHEL, they lack support from Red Hat.

Even though the existence of CentOS can potentially take money from Red Hat’s pockets, there never seemed to be any resentment or animosity. In fact, just yesterday, Red Hat surprised the Linux community and announced that it will sponsor that distribution going forward. In other words, CentOS is now owned by Red Hat Inc — the father has officially adopted its illegitimate baby and Fedora has a new step-brother.

Via Beta News

This is great news for the open source community. CentOS provides an excellent open alternative to RHEL but has suffered from quite a bit of lag that has left it a step or two behind other server grade distros. I’ll be taking a close look at this to see if it warrants a shift away from Ubuntu LTS.

image