From the “Open Source Project That Could’ files:
CentOS is a project that many people (myself included) rely on as a way to get all the goodness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, without the cost (or support – but that’s another story). That’s probably why there was a lot of concern when it took CentOS so very long to put out the 6.0 release.
CentOS 6.0 trailed the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux release by at least 8 months. It finally debuted in July and when it did, because it was so late, it was already out-of-date in terms of security. That’s why in September, CentOS went with a continuos repository to help get things on track.
CentOS is now very much on track with the RHEL upstream.
RHEL 6.2 was released by Red Hat the first week of December. Barely two weeks later and CentOS 6.2 is now out too. That’s a fantastic achievement. Now to be fair, the 6.0 release was likely more challenging due to the way that Red Hat packaged things, but the speed of the CentOS 6.2 release clearly indicates to me that there is a good process in place now.
CentOS isn’t the first RHEL clone to hit 6.2, Oracle Linux 6.2 was out a week earlier, but hey Oracle in a multi-billion dollar company. CentOS is a community project. For the community to rally and get it together, fixing the process and the release cycle is a tremendously positive message about the power of open source — and of course, about the power of the ‘itch’.
CentOS scratches an itch that many people have and when there is an itch, developers/community are going to want to scratch.
Congrats on the release CentOS and I personally hope that this is the patch that we’ll see for some time to come.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals.Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
