Would a CentOS user have access to the RH enterprise errata and packages. Would it be necessary to subscribe to the RH subscription service?

You would not/could not use the RHN for errata.

We provide it for free using yum and fast mirrors.

That sounds pretty cool. I bet you guys irritate redhat a wee bit.

I hope not. Our goal is not to work against anyone in the community, especially a corporation that has done so much for making Linux what it is today.

RedHat has publicly stated on many occasions that their business model is around support, and branding. Both of which we are not and can not approach. Meaning, we don't sell Oracle support, nor can we call it Red Hat Linux.

RedHat has changed their business model which is their right to do. They are focusing their product to where they feel it needs to go. They also choose to leave a niche open. This niche is the free software users and developers, and is a very large niche from my perspective! Unfortunately for RedHat it never brought them much money (just market-share), so it was dropped. We simply picked up those pieces.

So I really hope that RedHat is not irritated by us. In a way we are doing them a favor. We are keeping with many of the standards that they created, which means now there is an easy transition between the two Operating Systems for both software and administration.

Sorry for the length, but lots of people have asked me about this, and I wanted to post my thoughts publicly.

For the record, I asked Jeremy Hogan about this in a past LQ interview:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...209#post637209

--jeremy

gregk433,
I was recently introduced to your CentOS 3 project and want to commend you, Mr. Davis and the rest of the crew on an excellent job to date. After a little more study on it's long term feasibility, it is very possible my company may replace our RH 9 servers with CentOS in the future.

I am interested in possibly helping in any way I can with this project. For anyone else that would read this and want to get involved, where would one begin to start getting more involved with cAos?

Thanks,
Greg
(Hey, its a good name!)

Defiantly! First thing to do is to join in our IRC discussions. There are two channels of relevance (both at irc.freenode.net): #caos and #centos.

I realize that many people don't like IRC (and we too see many of the drawbacks), but there is something to be said about real time development with a group of people that just can not be done via email (due to high latency). Also, it is a great place to meet up with many of the other developers and start to understand the devel culture.

If IRC is impossible, then I suggest joining the *-devel@caosity.org mailing lists and offering some services. We need both technical and non-technical help.

Glad you like centos!