Few days ago a press release announcing “RedHat and CentOS Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation” has put some thoughts into some people that started articles called “Hell Freezes Over in Linux Land as Red Hat Makes Nice With Its Clone“.

No guys, you got it wrong! First of all RedHat is an open source driven company. The fact that they created RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) with most of the code generally available means that they wanted to have a community around their flagship Linux distribution. Fedora is good, but not as stable and as usable as RHEL, so CentOS is just the natural thing that got out of this.

The fact that RedHat now “joins forces” with CentOS means only one thing: the CentOS releases are not up to date on RHEL. Remember when RHEL 6 came out, it took CentOS more than 6 months to release version 6.

I belive that people that want to try and get used to RHEL go first and download and install CentOS. Then they will probably go with RedHat’s support. If CenOS can’t keep up with RedHat’s release cycle then this means people wanting to try RHEL by installing CentOS will not see the latest innovations that RedHad already baked into RHEL and might get a wrong impression, so RedHad had to act on it…