Red Hat and the CentOS Project today said they will team up to build what they called "a new CentOS" in a bid to accelerate adoption of the free operating system.

CentOS is a clone of Red Hat's most important product, compiled from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It could be seen as taking paying customers away from Red Hat. The two organizations could also be bitter rivals, but today they showed that they think working together can benefit both the customers who pay Red Hat gobs of money for enterprise-class Linux and those who use CentOS for free.

Although Red Hat gives away all of its source code, it makes more than a billion dollars a year. Software subscription prices guarantee updates, patches, bug fixes, support, training, compatibility with mission-critical applications, and legal protection from patent trolls that target open source users.

Red Hat guards that revenue stream in part by making sure rivals have to make at least some effort to profit off its open source contributions. In 2011, the company took action in response to Oracle building a Red Hat clone and selling cheaper support.

"In retaliation, Red Hat started shipping Linux kernel source code in a big tarball with the patches already applied, making it more difficult to build Linux distributions from the RHEL source," we noted in a feature on Red Hat's history.

Although Oracle was the target, the move affected CentOS, too. Developers of CentOS didn't let it stop them from compiling and updating their own Red Hat clone, which they continued to give away for free.

With today's announcement, CentOS is part of the Red Hat family. Fedora, another Red Hat-sponsored community project and operating system, will continue to provide the code future RHEL and CentOS releases are based upon.

"Red Hat will contribute its resources and expertise in building thriving open source communities to the new CentOS Project to help establish more open project governance and a roadmap, broaden opportunities for participation, open pathways for contribution, and provide new ways for CentOS users and contributors to bring the power of open source innovation to all areas of the software stack," Red Hat said. "With Red Hat's contributions and investment, the CentOS Project will be able to expand and accelerate, serving the needs of community members who require different or faster-moving components layered on top of CentOS, expanding on existing efforts to collaborate with open source projects such as OpenStack, RDO, Gluster, OpenShift Origin, and oVirt."

CentOS Project Leader Karanbir Singh wrote in his own announcement that the CentOS Linux platform itself isn't changing, but that "the process and methods built up around the platform however are going to become more open, more inclusive, and transparent."

Singh and several other core members of the CentOS team are going to work for Red Hat, "operating out of the Red Hat Open Source and Standards team in the CTO's Office," he wrote.

The CentOS project is still separated from RHEL in important ways, he continued:

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.

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.

In general, people who use CentOS today don't have to worry about it going away.

Profits and open source can co-exist

So what's in it for Red Hat? If we were to assume ulterior motives, we could note that bringing CentOS into the fold might just make it a little harder for Oracle to present itself as an attractive alternative.

But we shouldn't ignore Red Hat's long history of devotion to open source projects, even when it doesn't directly benefit the company's bottom line. Red Hat contributes more code to the Linux kernel than any other corporation, according to the Linux Foundation. It's also a big contributor to other open source projects, such as OpenStack.

Red Hat can commit itself both to profits and collaboration with the open source community. Building up CentOS' user base doesn't have to come at the expense of sales, since new CentOS users might end up being future Red Hat customers.

"Red Hat’s open source business is strong enough that CentOS is effectively a mindshare force multiplier rather than a RHEL competitor," noted Ryan Paul, Ars' former open source guru.

Some of the specifics still have to be worked out, but the marriage of Red Hat and CentOS seems like a logical one that could help improve Red Hat's already strong relationship with third-party developers. It's also not just about the operating system itself. RHEL is increasingly a platform for virtualization and cloud deployments, with Red Hat optimizing RHEL to run the OpenStack cloud infrastructure software. Most early OpenStack deployments have been based upon Ubuntu to Red Hat's chagrin. The company hopes a stronger CentOS will make RHEL the Linux platform of choice for building cloud networks.

As Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said in today's announcement, "by joining forces with the CentOS Project, we aim to build a vehicle to get emerging technologies like OpenStack and big data into the hands of millions of developers."