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CentOS 5 Released
jonesy16 writes "Only a few weeks behind the release of Red Hat Enterprise 5, CentOS announced today the immediate release of version 5 of the free derivative of RHEL 5. Torrents are available for both i386 and x86_64. New features include compiz and AIGLX support as well as better virtualization and thin-client support. Package updates include Apache-2.2, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome-2.16, and KDE-3.5."
About 75% of the University of Wisconsin Computer Science dept. (graduates + faculty + computer labs) uses CentOS. That's, I dunno, 400 computers?
A few people use it ... well, maybe more than a few as we have had 2 million unique IP Addresses do updates against our yum repositories in the last 12 months.
Well ... it seems that the Fedora team (and Board Chairman) do not seem to share your opinion of CentOS (they must not have gotten the memo to hate CentOS before we shared a FOSDEM 2007 devroom). Also see:
... but instead used debian or ubuntu. Of course they wouldn't ... Red Hat benefits greatly because CentOS gets software installed that can easily move to their flag ship product when and if the time is right.
... but that is enough for now. No, Red Hat is not loosing sleep because CentOS exists ... indeed, quite the opposite.
LinuxFormat Article
I'm sure that Red Hat would be much better off if the people who want to install a free server did not install CentOS (which can easily run anything on RHEL later if support and a paid for OS is required)
Also, take a look at the Red Hat bugzilla sometime and do a search for CentOS. The code base gets seen / installed by many more people on many more pieces of hardware, many of which would not have installed on RHEL but some other free OS if CentOS were unavailable. This allows RH to get feedback and bug reports from many more people to stablize their codebase. All the time, RH does not need to provide any real support to this group of people.
You can even argue that because of the popularity of CentOS combined with some big name 3rd party repositories like RPMForge and KBS CentOS Extras that a whole new need was demonstrated, and that the EPEL project was created to help fill that need. Again, Red Hat and RHEL users benefit greatly because of this colaboration.
There are other numerous advantages as well
RH admitted that 300+ packages in RHEL5 are rpms from FC6. RHEL 5 strongly resembles of FC6... it is nothing but augmented version of it anyway ...and CentOS is exactly that as well.
That's the whole point of the fedora project: to provide a base from which to produce RHEL.
The core difference, as has already been pointed out, is long-term support. If you find you need a security update for a particular package for Fedora Core 6 in a couple of years when FC9 is the latest version, good luck. Your only options are to upgrade the whole system or build the package (and any dependencies which also require updating) yourself.
You may not have a problem with that. CentOS and RHEL is intended for people who do.