Happy 4th Birthday CentOS.org

Something happened on December 4th, 2003 and it went largely unnoticed in the Linux world, even by the developers at the CentOS Project. On that date, the CentOS Project registered the domain name CentOS.org.

A couple days ago also largely unnoticed by just about everyone, albeit for different reasons as we were trying to serve updates to more than 2 million CentOS machines on the release of the first update set of our 4th CentOS version, CentOS.org turned 4 years old.

It has been a wild ride from nothing to a major player in the enterprise linux world. We have gone from not rated in the top 100,000 web sites to around 15,000 in Alexa.com traffic ratings and from not rated to a consistent 10th-15th place at distrowatch.com.

The CentOS Project would like to thank all the Developers, QA Team Members, Forum Moderators, Mailing List Moderators and Translators for all their hard work in producing CentOS.

We would also like to thank Red Hat, Inc. for being true to its open source roots. It is no coincidence that there are not any Linux distributions out there like CentOS based on any of the other paid enterprise linux offerings. Red Hat, Inc. is a first class organization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an outstanding operating system. We wish them both continued success.

Last, but certainly not least, the CentOS Project would like to thank our users. There is not a better community anywhere in open source than the CentOS community. You are the reason that CentOS is where we are today.

It has been a wild ride to this point and will no doubt continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Happy Birthday CentOS.org ... and here is wishing you many, many more

To squelch the questions (related to the changing content on www.centos.org), I decided this needs to be published.

The CentOS Team has been contacted by representatives of a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor's hired legal team regarding the use of said Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor's Trademarks on www.centos.org. (Full Email follows.) While the CentOS team feels we are using the Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor's marks in a fair and legal manner, we have no choice but to eliminate the majority of the Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor's marks that are being used on www.centos.org.

Over the next few days, we will be cleansing the CentOS website of the Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor's marks and/or possible marks. If you encounter any errors please take a moment to point them out via a comment here or catch donavan in #centos-web on irc.freenode.net.

At this point and going forward the CentOS project is not in any jeopardy. We have a strong group of committed developers and are growing like crazy. CentOS 4 is just around the corner; the future is brighter than ever.

A couple of points I need to make. Please DO NOT hassle the upstream vendor or their attorney over this matter. www.centos.org user contributed content in the form of forum posts, news and article comments, wiki content etc. do not fall directly under the control of www.centos.org. So in the normal course of user to user communication, the use of the upstream vendor's marks (to identify their brand) is not prohibited. Obviously if a CentOS team member merely copies existing front page content into a forum post that's going to be a problem.

If you feel the need to express dismay over this manner, go find 10 other sites that are violating the use of the upstream vendor's marks. Post them to the comments here and one of the team members will tabulate the list and forward it to the upstream vendor's legal team as a matter of courtesy.

Thank you,

Donavan and the rest of the CentOS Team

The new CentOS website has migrated to it's production home.

Xoops recently released the final version of newbb v2.

If you register during site development, your account will move intact to the production site.

With Lance Davis' blessing a website devoted to the CentOS community is under construction.