Fedora community + help of redhat company =fedora

redhat = fedora + some enterprise packages..

centos = redhat( from 2 month ago) + some new and extended packages

Fedora for user and centos for server and redhat for best server

fedora and centos dont need repository for update because have miror but rhel if you dont have rhnetcod cant update system

Interesting points.

CentOS should be binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise.

CentOS often lags behind a bit though - so may not have security fixes out in time - as it takes them time to QA/ensure they've removed RedHat brandings. http://lwn.net have had some articles about CentOS recently - concerning the project structure and the fact they made no real security patches/fixes available for about 4 months earlier this year... as they were busy sorting out 5.6.

Fedora is RedHat's development release where they try stuff out - this is released periodically, and is used as the foundation for a RedHat Enterprise release.

In a nutshell:

Redhat is enterprise ready server lots of testing before released, fully supported.

Fedora is cutting edge stuff - some of which may appear in a future release of Redhat Enterprise.

Centos is freebie Redhat Enterprise - they take source code, change Redhat names and Logos to Centos and rebuild the systems - doesnt contain all the apps but good enough to run in production. Stable but no Redhat support.

Oracle's Linux is also Redhat rebadged but with oracle specific patches added until they are subsequently adopted by Redhat - fully supported by Oracle.