Red Hat®, Inc. makes several versions of Enterprise Linux. Please see their website for their offerings.
The Fedora™ Project is a group that is sponsored by Red Hat®, Inc. and builds a GNU/Linux Distribution called Fedora™.
Oracle® Corporation also distributes a version of GNU/Linux known as Oracle® Enterprise Linux.
On January 7th, 2014 CentOS announced a collaborative effort with Red Hat: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-January/020100.html
Red Hat curates the trademarks for CentOS and is providing initial guidance and expertise required in establishing the formal board structure used to govern the CentOS Project.
Some members on the CentOS Project Governing Board work for Red Hat, Inc.
CentOS Linux is NOT Red Hat® Linux, it is NOT Fedora™ Linux. It is NOT Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. It is NOT RHEL. CentOS Linux does NOT contain Red Hat® Linux, Fedora™, or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.
CentOS is built from publicly available source code provided by Red Hat, Inc.
Some documentation on the CentOS website uses files that are provided {and copyrighted} by Red Hat®, Inc. This documentation is released via the Open Publication License (V1.0 or later). The copyright holder has added the further requirement that "Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder."
The CentOS project redistributes these original works (in their unmodified form) as a reference for CentOS, because CentOS is built from publicly available, open source SRPMS. We don't modify the documentation files in any way to be compliant with the copyright holder's distribution policy.
Oracle® Enterprise Linux is compiled in a process that is very similar to CentOS, where they take publicly available SRPMS and compile them into binary files for their GNU/Linux distribution. Oracle® claims on their FAQ that their Oracle Enterprise Linux product is a Red Hat compatible distribution. Oracle® says that they provide access to patches, fixes, updates, and backports for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL3) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) releases, delivered via a subscriber network, the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN).
Inasmuch as the CentOS Project uses a similar process to create the CentOS operating system, the CentOS Project does provide the same functionality for CentOS-2, CentOS-3, CentOS-4 and CentOS-5 via the CentOS Network (CN).
Note: "Linux®" is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, Red Hat® is a registered trademark and Fedora is a trademark of Red Hat®, Inc., and Oracle® is a registered trademark of Oracle® Corporation |