IBM, Red Hat, and CentOS

Tuesday, 9, July 2019 Rich Bowen announcement 5 Comments

CentOS community,

Today marks a new day in the 26-year history of Red Hat. IBM has finalized its acquisition of Red Hat which will operate as a distinct unit within IBM moving forward.

What does this mean for Red Hat’s contributions to the CentOS project?

In short, nothing.

Red Hat always has and will continue to be a champion for open source and projects like CentOS. IBM is committed to Red Hat’s independence and role in open source software communities so that we can continue this work without interruption or changes.

Our mission, governance, and objectives remain the same. We will continue to execute the existing project roadmap. Red Hat associates will continue to contribute to the upstream in the same ways they have been. And, as always, we will continue to help upstream projects be successful and contribute to welcoming new members and maintaining the project.

We will do this together, with the community, as we always have.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about today’s news, I encourage you to review the list of materials below. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright will host an online Q&A session in the coming days where you can ask questions you may have about what the acquisition means for Red Hat and our involvement in open source communities. Details will be announced on the Red Hat blog

More info:

Press release

Chris Wright blog - Red Hat and IBM: Accelerating the adoption of open source

FAQ on Red Hat Community Blog

5 thoughts on "IBM, Red Hat, and CentOS"

  1. Neil Rieck says:

    This is great news if true. My current employer adopted the following policy in 2015: RHEL (with support contract) is required for every customer-facing systems. All development, qualification and customer user acceptance systems require CentOS. One is the path to the other. (p.s. before this policy we were forced to license every system which cost a small fortune)

  2. me says:

    Obviously what Rich says is false. CentOS was never so badly with the publishing process of new (minor- or major-)releases as it is now under IBM. Scientific-Linux is now 1 Month ahead with 7.7, which was never the case while we had a competition... And CentOS-release 8 is even not seen, yet!

  3. Peter Marinov says:

    I guess this "In short, nothing." has a different meaning after the latest news about CentOS8 and CentOS Stream....

  4. Lars Aksel Opsahl says:

    "What does this mean for Red Hat’s contributions to the CentOS project?
    In short, nothing."

    Yes, this comment is totally misleading.

    When CentOS 8 now has changed it EOL from 2029 to 2021.

    This is a big problem for us because we just started to switch to CentOS 8. The last production server was installed with CentOs 8 two weeks ago.

    Lars

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