[CentOS-announce] CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

Tue Jan 7 21:09:27 UTC 2014

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With great excitement I'd like to announce that we are joining the Red
Hat family. The CentOS Project ( http://www.centos.org ) is joining
forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards
team ( http://community.redhat.com/ ) to foster rapid innovation
beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies.
Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further
expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is
easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we
maintain the established base.

We are also launching the new CentOS.org website (
http://www.centos.org ).

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The new initiative is going to be overseen by the new CentOS Governing
Board. The initial Board comprises of the existing CentOS Core team
members :

- - Ralph Angenent
- - Tru Hyunh
- - Johnny Hughes JR
- - Jim Perrin
- - Karanbir Singh

and also sees new members:
- - Fabian Arrotin, who comes to the board nominated from the community
- - Carl Trieloff, Karsten Wade, and Mike McLean join us, nominated by
Red Hat.

Please join me in welcoming the new members to the Board.

The key operating points of the Board are going to be: Public, Open,
and Inclusive. You can find more information about the governance
model, the board, and the operating policies we are proposing at
http://www.centos.org/about/governance/

Furthermore, some of the existing CentOS Core members are moving to
take up roles at Red Hat, as a part of their sponsorship of the CentOS
Project, allowing these people to work on the Project as their primary
job function. This includes Johnny Hughes Jr, Jim Perrin, Fabian
Arrotin, and myself. We will be working with and operating out of the
Red Hat Open Source and Standards team in the CTO's Office.

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Some of the things that are not changing:
- - The CentOS Linux platform isn't changing. The process and methods
built up around the platform however are going to become more open,
more inclusive and transparent.
- - The sponsor driven content network that has been central to the
success of the CentOS efforts over the years stays intact.
- - The bugs, issues, and incident handling process stays as it has been
with more opportunities for community members to get involved at
various stages of the process.
- - The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain.
Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated from
the RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm /
source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. In
summary:  we retain an upstream.

Feel free to reach out if you have specific concerns about how this
change impacts your CentOS story. URLs mentioned at the bottom of this
email should be a good starting point.

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Some of the key things that are changing:
- - Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL. This should not have
any impact to our ability to do what we have done in the past, it
should facilitate a more rapid pace of development and evolution for
our work on the community platform.

- - Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial
content delivery resources - how we are able to consume these and when
we are able to make use of this is to be decided.

- - Sources that we consume, in the platform, in the addons, or the
parallel stacks such as Xen4CentOS will become easier to consume with
a git.centos.org being setup, with the scripts and rpm metadata needed
to create binaries being published there. The Board also aims to put
together a plan to allow groups to come together within the CentOS
ecosystem as a Special Interest Group (SIG) and build CentOS Variants
on our resources, as officially endorsed. You can read about the
proposal at http://www.centos.org/variants/

- - Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some
of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind
closed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test,
and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.

The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted,
proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner
on the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone to
come along and participate.

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Contacting us works best via the established community mechanisms.
- - Real time chats via IRC ( http://wiki.centos.org/irc ) ; To keep
conversation sanity intact, I recommend using the #centos-devel
channel to discuss project related activity while #centos is best used
for end user conversations.

- - The Mailing lists are a great way to interface with the developers,
contributors and the community at large ( http://lists.centos.org ).
As with IRC, we recommend using the centos-devel list to talk about
project related issues while the general centos list is best used for
end user conversations.

- - The CentOS Forums are another great way to engage in conversation
with other users ( http://www.centos.org/forums ), if you prefer that
mechanism.

All the above mentioned venues are public and open to the community,
should you wish to discuss something privately, you can email us at
centosdev at centos.org. Press requests should be sent to
press at centos.org. Please note that it will take us much longer to
reply to private requests as compared to content on the public venues.

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In the coming days we are going to create opportunities for people to
come and get involved in more face to face interactions. Starting with
a regular scheduled office-hours format hangouts (
http://wiki.centos.org/OfficeHours ) that start early next week. We
are trying to split the sessions into two different timezones so as to
maximise the number of people who are able to join. The sessions will
run live, with #centos-devel on irc.freenode.net being used for
conversations alongside.

We are also running a CentOS Dojo on the 31st Jan 2014 at Belgium (
http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2014 ); The event will run
two tracks, with lots of opportunities for social interaction between
the talks; followed by CentOS in the Clouds Hack sessions. We are
limited in the number of people we can accomodate, so I encourage
everyone to register early.

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I want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors, the
contributors and the CentOS team members for all their help over the
years, the project is built completely upon those contributions - and
I look forward to seeing even more involvement from everyone as we
move forward.

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A Request:

We are still sorting out content in various places and it might take a
day or two to get everything in place. In the mean time if you find
something stale and perhaps misleading in the new context ( or the old
one! ) please drop in on #centos-devel at irc.centos.org and let us know.

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Some URLS:
- - http://www.centos.org/ The CentOS Project
- - http://wiki.centos.org/ CentOS Community wiki
- - http://community.redhat.com/ RedHat OSAS
- -
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/1/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces
- - Red Hat Press Release
- - http://community.redhat.com/centos-faq - Red Hat FAQ's about the
initiative
- - http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ - CentOS FAQ's about the initiative

Enjoy! and regards,

Karanbir Singh and everyone from the CentOS team,

- -- 
Karanbir Singh, Project Chair, The CentOS Project
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.centos.org/ | twitter.com/CentOS
GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc
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