Red Hat and the Clone Wars III: The dawn of CentOS
Until the announcement that CentOS Linux 8 would be EOL at the end of 2021, CentOS users enjoyed a relatively drama-free period of stability that might suggest RHEL has always had a viable, dependable clone with predictable releases. That is, as you’re probably already guessing, very far from the truth.
In this post we’ll look at the CentOS history from inception until the CentOS Project came under Red Hat’s direct sponsorship. That’s early 2004 through January 7, 2014 when the announcement went out to the world on the CentOS-announce list. We’ll also mention a few other attempts at cloning RHEL didn’t quite thrive over the long haul.
Note, I’m mostly leaving Oracle Linux out of this even though it was introduced in 2006. As you might have guessed, it’ll be the topic of another post on its own.