I think it's kind of misleading since it's only done for compatibility of the produced binaries. CentOS 5, until recently, was the actively maintained distro wi

I think it's kind of misleading since it's only done for compatibility of the produced binaries. CentOS 5, until recently, was the actively maintained distro with the oldest kernel, libc etc. versions. So if it runs on CentOS 5, it is guaranteed to run on anything. This is different from companies still using CentOS 5 and are running active services on it because they simply refused to upgrade. Python or rather PyPi does this too. They aren't using CentOS 5 Despite of it's age, but because of it.