In an effort to drive the development and adoption of new open-source technologies, Red Hat is taking a more active role in the CentOS Project, which oversees CentOS, a community-supported and produced Linux distribution that draws on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open-source technologies.

According to a press call Tuesday evening, Red Hat sees CentOS (the “Community ENTerprise Operating System”) as a way customers can get a robust, free OS, but also be set on a path towards subscription-based RHEL.

Red Hat’s contributions and investment will help the CentOS Project expand and enable components to be layered on top of CentOS such as OpenStack, RDO, Gluster, OpenShift Origin, and oVirt.

Red Hat will be contributing resources and expertise to CentOS and become a “catalyst” in the CentOS community. It will be doing this through opening the governance model to allow new contributors, fostering special groups for specific focuses such as SDN, and allowing for the creation of custom CentOS variants. Red Hat has also hired some of the core CentOS contributors.

The major change in the relationship between Red Hat and CentOS, writes to ZDNet blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, is that “Red Hat won’t be keeping CentOS at arm’s length anymore.”

In turn, Red Hat anticipates its role in the CentOS community to accelerate its development of enterprise-grade subscription solutions, such as RHEL, RHEL OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Much like Fedora, which Red Hat launched a decade ago, CentOS represents a platform that’s open to variation. While CentOS no doubt will be adopting leading-edge open source technologies, Red Hat said Fedora will continue to serve as the upstream project on which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases are based.