The Fedora project began in 2003. At the time, Red Hat had just canceled the old Red Hat Linux distro and was getting started with the commercial product that would be known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company wanted to continue to work with the open source community on a free Linux edition, and they started Fedora as a community-driven upstream contributor to RHEL.

Because Linux was open source, however, Red Hat could not distribute RHEL without making the source code available to others in the Linux community. A new category of distros emerged around the practice of removing trademarked material from RHEL and then compiling the source code to create a new, independent distribution. The most famous and most popular of these RHEL spin-offs was CentOS, which existed as an independent project for several years. Then in 2014, Red Hat surprised many experts by announcing that it would hire the CentOS developers and take over sponsorship of CentOS, thus making CentOS an in-house Red Hat project that was very close to RHEL but available for no cost.

The result is a constellation of three Linux distributions – two community-based and one commercial, each with a slightly different role, but all fitting together somehow to achieve a greater purpose for Red Hat. Swap sat down with Jim Perrin, Community Platform Engineering Manager, CentOS/Fedora at Red Hat, to sort through the complicated relationships of Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL.

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