| Congrats to the CentOS team. You filled a much needed gap when the Fedora / RHEL split happened. As someone who used Red Hat Linux in the 90's / early 2000's, you had to be there to know how large of a gap the CentOS team filled. Historical background: Red Hat Linux (RHL) was the most widely used Linux distro in the late 90's / early 2000's. Overnight, RedHat destabilized RHL by turning it into Fedora with it's rapid release cycles, lack of back ports, bleeding edge packages etc. RHEL became a closed distro with only source distributed, but none of the tools to easily replicate the build. RHL users (who were the majority of Linux users) were faced with a choice. Pay for RHEL or switch distros. This really sucked b/c RHL deployments were largely servers that were designed for long term deployments. The community was faced with a large scale migration of servers which involved a large population of web and edge of network deployments. This is when CentOS stepped in, created a binary compatible build of RHEL, and allowed long time RHL users to continue with a RedHat-like distro. RedHat has been a major contributor to OSS. However, projects like CentOS have filled very important roles in the Linux and OSS communities. Again, congrats to the team. |