Your logic here is fallacious. Fermi Linux was never intended for internal use, and it had a small team with limited time to work on it. The improvement you cite could just as well be attributed to the fact that you can accomplish more with more people working on it, and the fact that they were now designing it for outside use.

As for how the project progressed, it came out of a HEPIX meeting in 2003. The Red Hat change was discussed, and the system's two Fermilab developers went home, repackaged it, and returned to the 2004 HEPIX meeting with a RHEL 3 rebuild - Scientific Linux 3.0.1. My understanding is that the collaboration with CERN occurred AFTER that.

Multiple personal experiences != data. Your sample is biased by virtue of your own work, whatever it is, and the people you associate with. Your sample is also too small, when measured against the millions of downloads. What's more, it is the generic version of Scientific Linux that is used most widely, and not the Fermi or CERN versions.

I can't comment on the rest of what is written here, but this statement in particular is definitely a false statement. CERN did not take over this project. Scientific Linux remains a collaboration between the two labs. See:

If you click on the "about" page, you'll see that there are two "main" developers from Fermilab, two from CERN, one from DESY, and one from ETHZ.

I stand corrected. It seems I've been conflating the terms. Again, will correct this.

I agree that the fact that basic research leads to unexpected spinoff technologies is not generally given sufficient recognition, which your comment seems to imply, aix tom. But don't forget that both the Tevatron and LHC computing architectures are based on the use of cheap commercial technology. Without affordable computing components and later PCs, they could not accomplished all of these other things. It's a symbiosis. Of course, from your comment it isn't clear whether or not you meant to dismiss corporate innovation entirely, or just short-sighted corporate greed. So my apologies if I'm making any wrong assumptions.

Yes. That should have been Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Thanks for catching that -- it's been corrected.

So, in case any other readers stumble around Hawking's site trying to figure out where the original poster got this information, you can reach it by clicking here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/component/content/article/96