Tuesday, January 4, 2011

CentOS - The Free Enterprise-Class Linux Distro

It has been rumored that Facebook uses CentOS.  It may or may not be true.  What is true is that CentOS has and is making a great number of inroads in the enterprise.  If Ubuntu is the free Linux desktop OS, then CentOS is the free Linux enterprise OS. 

Below is from the CentOS homepage:

"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.)  CentOS is free.

CentOS is developed by a small but growing team of core developers.  In turn the core developers are supported by an active user community including system administrators, network administrators, enterprise users, managers, core Linux contributors and Linux enthusiasts from around the world."


This one hour overview on (FLOSS Weekly) of CentOS does a very nice job of laying out the the history, business and technical aspects of CentOS: