"CentOS, the popular community-supported clone of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, hit Version 5.3 in March, some three months after
its parent distribution, RHEL 5.3 began shipping.
"CentOS is based on Red Hat's freely available Enterprise Linux
source packages. The CentOS project strips trademarked logos and
other branding from the packages before building them into a free,
Linux-based, operating system that boasts binary compatibility with
its parent.
"Version 5.3 of CentOS shares in RHEL's recent improvements
around virtualization, application development, security and
storage. Unlike, RHEL, CentOS may be had without any subscription
fees, which makes CentOS a popular operating system option for many
hosting providers and cloud computing vendors.
"Applications designed and tested to work with RHEL should work
just the same on CentOS, and security and bugfix patches from Red
Hat flow downstream to CentOS, as well. However, the distribution
lacks direct support from Red Hat, and CentOS systems can't be
managed through the Red Hat Network service."
