Appearantly, when Red Hate released a version of RHEL which presumably contained a lot of critical updates CentOS took it’s sweet time to release their version of this release It actually took them so long that Scientific Linux beat them And now it seems to be a general understanding (I believed it too ) that Scientific Linux has a quicker release cycle.

At first I thougt it was because Scientific Linux had a relaxed attitude as far as 100% binary compatibility goes, whatever that may mean. But then I read the following lovely story regarding the CentOS team:

You obviously weren’t using it when the major release was delayed by weeks as some guy went on vacation without telling anyone (and was actually presumed dead by some!) and the other guy went on honeymoon.

This is just brilliant

In defense of the team behind CentOS; they are all volunteers with dayjobs and such. And I have you know that CentOS isn’t always slower in their releases! Look at this:

RHEL 6.1 : 2011-05-19
CentOS 6.1 : 2011-12-20
SL 6.1 : 2011-07-28

RHEL 6.2 : 2011-12-06
CentOS 6.2 : 2011-12-20
SL 6.2 : 2012-02-16

RHEL 6.3 : 2012-06-21
CentOS 6.3 : 2012-07-09
SL 6.2: 2012-xx-xx