What is CentOS?

A couple of episodes ago we talked to Carl George about EPEL, and half that conversation ended up being about CentOS. The questions kept coming, so we made a whole episode out of it.

This is the biggest panel the show has ever had. Amy Marrich chairs the CentOS Board and does technical marketing for OpenStack at Red Hat. Troy Dawson leads the CentOS Stream team, sits on the board, and builds CentOS Stream for RISC-V. Shaun McCance is the CentOS Community Architect, and as of two weeks ago the Fedora Community Architect as well.

We get into:

• Why CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream are different projects, and why one of them retired around RHEL 9
• The pipeline: Fedora, then Fedora ELN, then CentOS Stream, then RHEL, and why Btrfs is the example everyone reaches for
• How Stream and RHEL now build from the same commit, on a one-week cadence versus six months
• Why partners shipped on RHEL 9 launch day because they had been building against Stream 9
• How the board actually works, why only one seat speaks for Red Hat, and what the SIGs and the SIG Council do
• Where to file a bug (against RHEL, not at Troy)
• How to contribute without writing code, and why being new makes you good at documentation

There is a written companion post at https://itguyeric.com/blog/fedora-ep59-what-is-centos/