> - Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL.
> - Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial content delivery resources
> - Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind closed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test, and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.
> - The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain. Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated from the RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm / source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. In summary: we retain an upstream.
CentOS now has a "master" where before, the GPL allowed them to simply take the source, remove trademarks, and re-compile as CentOS, getting the benefits of a corporately-funded distro without the legal constraints of evil IP and what not.
RH also may choose to play ball with certain organizations that I don't agree with. This may affect CentOS in some way. An indy distro can give them the finger and tell them to get bent. My goal is not money, it's freedom from oversight, freedom to do as I please, freedom to have an unencumbered distro not tainted by the likes of the false notion of IP, legal nonsense, you name it. Debian is growing for a reason. One of those reasons is because it's an indy distro.
CentOS has always been a "slave" of Red Hat by design and, before this move, the master could even sue it for misappropriating trademarks. Now, QA of packages can be done in the open, because it would no longer be as problematic to ship test-quality packages that still happen to include a Red Hat trademark.
"With great excitement I'd like to announce that we are joining the Red Hat family. The CentOS Project ( http://www.centos.org ) is joining forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards team ( http://community.redhat.com/ ) to foster rapid innovation beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies. Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we maintain the established base."
(continues)