home wiki mailing lists mirror list irc forums bugs donate welcome to centos the community enterprise operating system centos is an enterprise-class linux distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by red hat, inc. for red hat enterprise linux. centos conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be functionally compatible. (centos mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) centos is developed by a small but growing team of core developers.