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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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 ). - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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. - ------------- 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlLMbQcACgkQMA29nj4Tz1sTnQCgj2fYxYpTjA0KwH7TpCWjE4gg w2cAniQWb/nh6Zn/8daSQ3EAfLIzGNKg =KJOk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----