[22][23][24] Infiscale described its GravityOS as "[including] the small footprint of Caos",[25] indicating a certain level of influence from the discontinued distribution.

Davis had ceased contribution to the project, but continued to hold the registration for the CentOS domain and PayPal account.

In August 2009, the CentOS team reportedly made contact with Davis and obtained the centos.info and centos.org domains.

[29] In January 2014, Red Hat announced that it would sponsor the CentOS Project, "helping to establish a platform well-suited to the needs of open source developers that integrate technologies in and around the operating system".

[21] CloudLinux created AlmaLinux to provide a community-supported successor to CentOS Linux, aiming for binary-compatibility with the current version of RHEL.

[37] CentOS developers use Red Hat's source code to create a final product very similar to RHEL.

Technical support is primarily provided by the community via official mailing lists, web forums, and chat rooms.

The project is affiliated with Red Hat but aspires to be more public, open, and inclusive.

Software Collections (SCL) is a CentOS repository that provides a set of programming languages, database servers, and various related packages.

Instead, a parallel set of tools is installed in the /opt directory, and can be optionally enabled per application by using supplied scl utility.

For example, the default versions of Perl or MySQL remain those provided by the base CentOS installation.

[171] MinimalCD images contain a minimum of packages required for a functional installation, with no compromises in security or network usability.

These minimal images use the standard CentOS installer with all of its regular features minus the selection of packages.

SIGs have the freedom to modify and enhance CentOS in various ways, including adding more cutting-edge software, rebuilding existing packages depending on the requirements, providing alternative desktop environments, or making CentOS available on otherwise unsupported architectures.

Those repositories include the following:[203] CentOS Stream is a "continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL.