It appears that Redhat is starting to offer newer packages as an add on license to their distribution. In the past I believe they only offered add on license packages beyond what did not come with the base distribution like GFS or the HA packages. Of course this has also changed over time. The latest beta release of software collections and the developer suite shows that they are providing software channels that install newer versions of GCC(4.8), Python(2.7, 3.3), PHP, perl, mariadb, etc. I'm wondering if at some point Redhat is going to remove these packages from the base distribution and only have them as add on licensed channels. I guess they still need a baseline version that will stay the same for the customers who refuse to update for compatibility reasons. At this point the developer suite is a pretty good deal because you get RHEL server with most of the licensed add on channels for only $99 a year. However, you're not suppose to use it for production.. Is there a plan for the CentOS group to release these newer packages too? If these packages start being used by developers and required to run their programs/web apps I think it could marginalize RHEL clone distributions like CentOS.
David.