I asked a patent office employee about this. Apparently, a thing is only prior art if it is patented itself, or is published in an accepted academic journal, and then only if such things can be found in the ten hours the examiner is given per patent application.
I see this as a good thing. Seems to me that we are basically getting back RedHat releases pre-RHEL. Fedora is great for the desktop, but I really like "Enterprise Linux" on the server side. I basically abandoned RedHat after the RHEL/Fedora split. Went to Gentoo (to unstable at the time) for a bit, Ubuntu, then CentOS during the late 4.x releases. I will pretty much stick with CentOS from here on out, why? Well enterprise customers who what support can get it, people who don't can easily use it, and those that don't want to pay now but know they will need to later will have an easy path forward. And its nice to have a major release that will remain stable and patched for a 7 year haul. Some folks seem to be concerned like this is a bad thing, RedHat has been a model citizen for open source. The amount of work they do in backporting fixes for people who need to remain on a version for whatever reason is huge. On top of the fact that they make most (all?) of their own software freely available as well. There is really no advantage for them to do anything to CentOS other than keep it doing what its doing, but faster.
