[CentOS-announce] CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

[news 28]

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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.

 

We are also launching the new CentOS.org website (

http://www.centos.org ).

 

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The new initiative is going to be overseen by the new CentOS Governing

Board. The initial Board comprises of the existing CentOS Core team

members :

 

- - Ralph Angenent

- - Tru Hyunh

- - Johnny Hughes JR

- - Jim Perrin

- - Karanbir Singh

 

and also sees new members:

- - Fabian Arrotin, who comes to the board nominated from the community

- - Carl Trieloff, Karsten Wade, and Mike McLean join us, nominated by

Red Hat.

 

Please join me in welcoming the new members to the Board.

 

The key operating points of the Board are going to be: Public, Open,

and Inclusive. You can find more information about the governance

model, the board, and the operating policies we are proposing at

http://www.centos.org/about/governance/

 

Furthermore, some of the existing CentOS Core members are moving to

take up roles at Red Hat, as a part of their sponsorship of the CentOS

Project, allowing these people to work on the Project as their primary

job function. This includes Johnny Hughes Jr, Jim Perrin, Fabian

Arrotin, and myself. We will be working with and operating out of the

Red Hat Open Source and Standards team in the CTO's Office.

 

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Some of the things that are not changing:

- - The CentOS Linux platform isn't changing. The process and methods

built up around the platform however are going to become more open,

more inclusive and transparent.

- - The sponsor driven content network that has been central to the

success of the CentOS efforts over the years stays intact.

- - The bugs, issues, and incident handling process stays as it has been

with more opportunities for community members to get involved at

various stages of the process.

- - 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.

 

Feel free to reach out if you have specific concerns about how this

change impacts your CentOS story. URLs mentioned at the bottom of this

email should be a good starting point.

 

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Some of the key things that are changing:

- - Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL. This should not have

any impact to our ability to do what we have done in the past, it

should facilitate a more rapid pace of development and evolution for

our work on the community platform.

 

- - Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial

content delivery resources - how we are able to consume these and when

we are able to make use of this is to be decided.

 

- - Sources that we consume, in the platform, in the addons, or the

parallel stacks such as Xen4CentOS will become easier to consume with

a git.centos.org being setup, with the scripts and rpm metadata needed

to create binaries being published there. The Board also aims to put

together a plan to allow groups to come together within the CentOS

ecosystem as a Special Interest Group (SIG) and build CentOS Variants

on our resources, as officially endorsed. You can read about the

proposal at http://www.centos.org/variants/

 

- - 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 changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted,

proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner