[CentOS] How does such long term support work?

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 10:42:46AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
> NetBSD), is a UNIX derived system, while Linux was derived from Minix, 
> which was created from scratch as a Unix work-alike.

Umm.  No; Linux was not derived from Minix.  Minix was a micro-kernel
message-passing based system developed by Tanenbaum for education
purposes (see "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation").

Linux is a traditional monolithic design with shared data
structures.  (Yes, early Linux used the Minix filesystem because of the
early development environment used... that's the closest they came).

There is even a comparison of early Linux (0.01, 0.11 etc) to Minix
where there is no similarity in the code base, on Tanenbaum's own
site:
  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/codecomparison/

-- 

rgds
Stephen