CentOS gives Red Hat a kicking
INTEROP NEWS is convinced that a free version of Red Hat which just removes the trademarks is giving the Open Sauce outfit a good kicking on the popularity stakes.
CentOS is identical to Red Hat and even uses Red Hat updates and patches. The only thing that the software does not do is provide an expensive service contract.
Interop cites cases where companies, who would normally install Red Hat, are using the latest version of CentOS as a way of saving cash.
The OS seems to be taking money away from Red Hat and the outfit does not really care. In fact when the latest version of CentOS hit the shops Red Hat's spokesman seemed "strangely and almost serenely unconcerned".
The view seems to be that Red Hat is only really interested in are the punters who can fork over big bucks for all the bells and whistles without even thinking about it.
It is for this reason, INTEROP postulates, that Red Hat is not interested in flogging a cut down version of its software.Red Hat is running like any luxury brand will not cannibalise its high-end sales by making its top-of-the-line product accessible to the riff raff.
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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.
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.