One Year Later: Paul Cormier on Red Hat and the CentOS Project

When it comes to making sure people are happy and excited about Red Hat joining forces with the CentOS Project, one of the most important stakeholders inside of Red Hat is EVP & President of Products and Technologies, Paul Cormier. Paul was involved with the hard but important business decision that led to splitting the original Red Hat Linux into Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a move that helped inspire the creation of CentOS and other projects to help fill the community-driven need for a slow-moving platform.

In a video interview on ServerWatch, Paul talks about how things are going since Red Hat formally joined the CentOS Project. Paul says, "I think it's been great for the community, I think it's been great for the CentOS guys, I think it's been great for us at Red Hat."

One question we often hear is, "OK, I see how the CentOS community benefits, but what is in it for Red Hat?"

"(F)or us, it's a way to give the development world a platform," Paul says, "to go off and do development of other pieces in open source."

This is exactly the problem the Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team set out to resolve by providing useful, popular, and complete platforms for projects and users to use for testing and developing open source solutions as variants on top of the base platform. The popular CentOS Project already has a healthy community that uses the operating system in a variety of situations and organizations, and now we can scale out the work developers have been doing to help make it a complete platform.

Another question people often ask is, "How does CentOS Linux fit with selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux?"

Paul answers this simply: "We're an open source company. We decided a long time ago if as a company, if you draw a line and say, everything below is open and everything above is closed, it just doesn't work, so we just don't draw the line."

Part of the fun now with the CentOS Project is working to make it the most useful platform for community development.

Follow CentOS on Twitter and get involved by attending a CentOS event, and by joining IRC conversations and forum discussions. Find out more about the CentOS community at CentOS.org.