Send in the clones
There are several prominent RHEL rebuild projects besides CentOS:
CentOS in the limelight
CentOS was an offshoot of a separate Linux project called Caos Linux, said Kurtzer, who is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory administrator and a programmer as well. But it turned out the Caos Foundation's more popular project was a rebuild of RHEL.
"For a new distribution to be widely used, it must demonstrate to the community that the project and the product are both stable, reliable solutions," Kurtzer said. "But because CentOS is based on a known codebase, it was able to short-circuit the typical path and become an almost instant success."
Kurtzer doesn't have firm numbers, but he estimates there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of CentOS users. The first version was announced in December 2003.
CentOS doesn't veer from the Red Hat course. "The point... is to be as legally identical as possible," Kurtzer said. CentOS tries, for example, to build security updates as quickly as possible, with an informal guarantee of a 24-hour turnaround after Red Hat releases the original.
CentOS isn't exactly free. The Caos Foundation asks for a $12 per server per year donation to defray download costs, though few beyond some companies pay, Kurtzer said.
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