Looking at the Slashdot comments, I saw some gems, but this one hits the nail:
"One does have to wonder what is ACTUALLY going on here. Presumably Red Hat wants to harness somehow all the energy around CentOS. One suspects the installed CentOS base is vastly larger than the RHEL installed base, and there is a whole lot of energy in unpaid peer support. Presumably Red Hat is eyeing that energy enviously. For CentOS' part, it is much less clear what they gain. Possibly Red Hat gave them an ultimatum, implying or spelling out that they could make their life a living hell, by making it very hard to recompile the source, perhaps as simply as threatening to contaminate the source so thoroughly with Red Hat branding that it would be impractical to "clean" it.
This is all guesswork, but it at least makes some degree of sense as a possibility. Officially, there is absolutely no hint what the motivation is on either side.
Likely the guys at Scientific Linux and the other RHEL clones, the ones that apparently won't be under this new golden umbrella, will have some ideas of substance about what is going on."
Now, what I was thinking about was trying to see if we could unify as many of these EL spins as possible to produce a sort of "unified", independent distribution. I remember that a friend, me, and some others were, a little while back, trying to build a new EL clone called Ascendos to try and counter CentOS's shortfalls at the time, and serve as a sort of generic "base" distribution that could be used for re-spins, like (theoretically) SL. Ironically,
http://centos.org/variants/ this part seems to be treading into that territory.
I have been trying to use the prospect of EL7 as a way to try and get everyone back together on it, but this is a real game-changer we should really discuss. Personally, I just think that we need less duplication in this realm, but afaik SL is the 2nd most-popular EL re-spin behind CentOS itself. Can you really call CentOS an EL re-spin anymore if CentOS is now owned by Red Hat?