Oracle is doing the same thing CentOS is doing. Providing RHEL 4 and 5, stripping trademark Redhat name out leaving all else same. Even provides support if desired at about half cost of Redhat, but the basic product and install support level is free.

But on a recent trade show keynote, the Red Hat guy (wearing his Red Hat pin and name tag) repeatedly made references to "you can install this on Red Hat Server version x or CENTOS version x".

"...of course, with the RHES version, you get support... that would be, for this product, me".

Which makes sense when you think of it. Corporations pay for support and priority fixes when things go wrong. Small shops who want to risk it are free to use the CENTOS version. But multinationals wont, so they'll pay big bucks to Red Hat.

Makes snese to me...

I agree with Willy - people who need guarantee support will fork out for RHEL.

In fact, we use CentOS on our development servers but RHEL on the live servers which keeps development costs down but keeps a compatible base OS.

What we do is buy Red Hat for our critical production servers and use CensOS for our less than critical servers (mail, DNS, DHCP, etc) and test boxes.
If CentOS was not available we would be using Debian or Ubuntu for our non Red Hat machines like my desktop.