Red Hat acquired CentOS in 2014Īlthough CentOS was and is a wildly popular distribution-for a couple of years, it was the most commonly used Web server distro in the world-it suffered its share of community struggles. It also made it easier for developers to build and manage dev environments that would be guaranteed-compatible to their commercially supported RHEL production environments. This allowed CentOS to enjoy guaranteed binary compatibility with 'proper' RHEL.Īs a non-paywalled, no-hassles version of RHEL, CentOS appealed to a broader market of developers, tinkerers, and others who might eventually decide to upgrade to commercially supported RHEL. Traditional CentOS is a free-as-in-beer rebuilding of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, built from RHEL's own source code-but with Red Hat's proprietary branding removed and without Red Hat commercial support. Since then, each major version increment of RHEL has resulted in a corresponding new major version of CentOS, following the same versioning scheme and built largely from the same source. CentOS's first 2004 release was named version 2-to coincide with then-current RHEL 2.1. What’s a CentOS, anyway?ĬentOS-which is short for Community Enterprise Linux Operating System-was founded in 2004. Originally announced in September 2019, CentOS Stream serves as 'a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL'-it's intended to look and function much like a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it will be a year or so in the future. Moving forward, there will be no CentOS Linux-instead, there will (only) be CentOS Stream. On Tuesday, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen each announced a massive change in the future and function of CentOS Linux.

Centos 7