In 2012-2014, CentOS had a resources issue. It was far more popular than they had resources to support. With the then upcoming switch from RHEL6 to 7, my suspic

In 2012-2014, CentOS had a resources issue. It was far more popular than they had resources to support. With the then upcoming switch from RHEL6 to 7, my suspicion is that they were worried about having large delays in releasing like they had at the start of the RHEL6 release. Here is the mailing list entry for when they were acqi-hired : https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-January/020100.html https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu... Instead of seeing CentOS fold, Red Hat decided to hire the core members and support the project. They set up a governance structure for the project, which pretty much guaranteed a RH majority in all votes. AFAICT, there was no requirement for public voting, board seat terms, elections, or public input. CentOS never really had the strong (public) governance model of something like Debian. RedHat bought the project the old fashioned way — they hired the people who worked on it and stacked the board.