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Is CentOS Hurting Red Hat?
AlexGr writes "Jeff Gould raises an interesting question in Interop News:
Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid support, but it does track Red Hat updates and patches closely, and usually makes them available within a few hours or at most a few days of the upstream provider, which it refers to for legal reasons as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Free support for CentOS can be found in numerous places around the web, and a few third parties offer modestly priced paid support for those who want it."
I'm going to have to go with "doesn't hurt Red Hat" on many counts.
I doubt too many sales are lost here.
And the article's example doesn't really prove the point. So a shop of Red Hat users balked at upgrades and associated fees, and decided to go CentOS because they were a seasoned Linux shop. If it weren't CentOS, it would have been something else. The veteran shops will run Linux for free because they don't need the support, period. And they will find the distro that lets them do that.
(And I'm not quite sure what the referenced Google graph is supposed to demonstrate. I suspect he's claiming the higher count and increase in hits for CentOS indicates more popularity, and lost revenues for Red Hat, but I see it as those needing to do their own support pretty much start with Google. Red Hat licensees will start with Red Hat support.)
I would have thought that would have been obvious... maybe I'll go RTFA now.
The type of organizations that want Red Hat Enterprise Linux want it for the support Red Hat offers. Take that away and there's not really any competition.
The user benefits because it is almost a binary copy of an enterprise class GNU/Linux. And Red Hat benefits because of the increased familiarity in a potential userbase.
"Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS?"
um...because they have too?!
"open source" look it up on wikipedia...on second thought...
In my previous gig, we ran ~10,000 RH7.3 servers. Like the author's colleagues, we got to the point where we needed to upgrade. We were amazed that RedHat refused to give us a break on cost; they wouldn't shave off a single dollar. On 10k licenses, mind you! So, we waved goodbye to RH & migrated the whole thing to Debian. Much less headaches & drama. I'm not at the point where I want to tell RedHat to go screw, but you gotta question what they're thinking.
CentOS essentially acts as advertising for the Enterprise RedHat editions. It allows sysadmins to stick with the same familiar set of tools on both systems where it is considered desirable to have a support contract and systems where this is less of an issue.
RedHat can't do much to curb this anyway - most of what they produce is standing on the shoulders of other GPL software - but if they did, I'd imagine we'd see a commensurate rise in the use of Debian, Ubuntu and (gasp!) SuSE/OpenSuSE.
GPL FTW.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
It is a bit of an asinine question why Red Hat "tolerates" CentOS. Red Hat has no option here--nor should they. By distributing code or binaries that were created by people other than Red Hat, and licensed under GPL, Red Hat has explicitly agreed that CentOS (or anyone) has the right to do the same.
Red Hat is welcome to hold whatever opinion they want on whether they *like* CentOS to do what they do... but in the end, it's none of their damn business how someone else decides to distribute GPL'd code (within the license terms, of course... Red Hat is also a creator of a significant body of GPL code).
Buy Text Processing in Python
I looked into RHEL when they dropped support for RH 8/9, and they wanted far more money than I was willing to pay to kick around the tires at home or on my development box. When time came to look at 'enterprise' grade distributions, SuSE made it much easier on the developers. Fast forward and I found that I never bothered to even try RHEL 3, 4, and 5. Same went for Oracle's branded version. With no easy way to patch and having to deal with accounting to get a license, meh.
What changed it for me was Centos. I found that I could use the free as in beer versions for all my personal/internal needs, and it was so dang close to OEL and RHEL it became a no-brainer for testing and some dev work. With the internal blessings from our side that our code would work, QA did the formal testing on the branded versions of Linux. Folks running our product, of course, would want OS support - so they purchased the formal 'supported' OS from the commercial vendors. I suspect Centos is saving RHEL/OEL sales that might have gone to Ubuntu or other variants.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Red Hat makes money selling services to big companies who can't afford to be wrong. They sell CYA insurance to suits. CentOS is probably a plus, as it lets people test drive the real thing for free. When you have to put your career on the line in a large company, you pay Red Hat to Cover Your Ass. They are good at it, and the rate of pay reflects it.
Did we miss the point of the GPL? The instance of the software is owned by the user. They can do what they want with it. If they feel like doing everything on their own, they can do so (CentOS). If they want to pay someone else to make their life easier, they can do so (RedHat). RedHat knows this. "Choosing" to tolerate is the one choice RedHat doesn't have: If RedHat wants to use GPL'd software, they have to let other people play by the same rules they do. CentOS isn't going to hurt RedHat any more than Debian does.
I don't think Red Hat is tolerating it. They simply have no choice. The OS and most of the components installed with it are licensed under the GPL, which states that exactly this sort of thing can happen.
It's all (I believe) GPL, so they HAVE to provide the source, and there's nothing to prevent someone else compiling and releasing it as CentOS does. They'll just have to deal with it.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
One of the things that makes CentOS a clear winner is that because it is a completely compatible recompilation of RH, going from a test CentOS install to a fully supported RH entitlement is very easy. Thus I install CentOS initially on all my servers initially and then when I put them into production, I convert them to RHEL and buy an entitlement for them. Some of my less important servers remain CentOS. One of the main reasons for converting my servers to RHEL is that I can watch over them all, in terms of patches and security eratta, from the RHN.
In other cases, I can convert a RHEL box to CentOS, then build the replacement server with its entitlement, allowing me to keep the original server in production for a few weeks or months while the new server is ramped up.
So if anything CentOS actually increases RH usage because it is so easy to, at any time, buy entitlements from RH, convert the CentOS machines, and get whatever level of support you deem necessary at the time.
The author seems to think that the cheapest subscription available is $799. This is not the case. You can purchase a 1 year subscription for $349. While it is not quite $99, it is still a darn sight cheaper. There are also discounts available for certain organizations (charities and education, for example.)
I used to work for a large company, and even if CentOS is freely available software such as Oracle, Legato Networker, and others do not provide support for its products on other operating systems that those certificates, redhat, suse or other paid distros.
If you are running an expensive product like Oracle, Legato Networker, HPOV NNM, HP DataProtector and others, and we want to be able to get the support , then you had to buy Redhat.
My humble opinion, I do not believe that CentOS is hurting RedHat, if CentOS did not exist, other distributions take place, and not necessarily clones redhat.
I work for a company with ~20 employees that sells a software package that needs its own unix server.
It doesn't matter how many times I say 'CentOS is 100% compatible, and FREE! (w00t)' to my boss. When a machine goes to a customer, it goes out with Red Hat. Even if no one ever calls Red Hat for support, that warm fuzzy CYOA feeling of having a big well known company behind your product is irreplaceable. At the same time, we have a stack of CentOS machines and VMs in the office for testing and development for no additional cost to us.
I can honestly say that CentOS made Red Hat a much more palatable choice as we switch away from our previous UNIX- SCO Openserver.
A more important question, are either of them hurting Microsoft?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
That's like asking why I "tolerate" the speed limit, or why I tolerate my bank demanding I pay my mortgage after signing the contract to do so (okay, so those are kind of crappy examples). Their product is licensed such that CentOS can and (I must say I am very grateful for) does make use of the source code. What's the problem? It's not as though RedHat has any say in the matter. The article even points out; "After all, the vast majority of the packages in RHEL were not created by Red Hat, and they are all governed by the GPL, which is absolutely clear about the obligation to redistribute code." Well duh! Someone could just as easily claim that MySQL is losing money because distro XYZ includes it when the end user could be paying MySQL for installation and configuration support. And so on. The article is basically drivel IMO by someone who comprehends what the GPL is, but doesn't "get it" or the real value it represents.
Red Hat tolerates Cent-OS because they are two different types of OSes. Red Hat is for mostly businesses who need solid support, Cent-OS is for hobbyists and smaller businesses who don't need much support. Also, Cent-OS gives more or less a "trial version" of Red Hat because Red Hat isn't selling the OS like MS and Apple does, they sell support for the OS and theres nothing worse then having a potential big customer decide that the differences between Red Hat and Windows are "too great" and they don't use Red Hat when Cent-OS can get them the look-and-feel along with the programs Red Hat has. But lastly, Red Hat is an open company, they try not to be evil unlike MS, sure they like to make money but building a solid OS is their first priority and an OS cannot be stable, secure and fully functional without it being open.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I work from a company that runs most of its products on top of Redhat EL3 and EL4. While there is something to be said about Redhat's quality of support- for inhouse development wortk it isn't so important. Its value comes form supporting our customers at an OS level alleviating us from supporting the OS. (We require our customers to purchase Redhat support contracts). What I believe _is_ hurting redhat is how their sales department insists that making copies of Redhat is illegal. We have been told time and time again that it is illegal for us to run copies of Redhat that are not paid for within our support contract. The truth is- as long as you aren't expecting support for the unpaid for copies and you are not selling them to other companies (alone or as part of your product, because of redhat trademarks) it is fine to use as many inhouse copies as you want. It took me monthes to convince management at our company that Redhat Licensing is completely different beast than, say, Windows Server licensing while at the same time fighting a battle with the software programmers trying to convince them that Linux is _not_ freeware. The concept of GPL'd software seems to be lost on members of the IT management sector. CentOS has become a good inhouse alternative to redhat since it is binary compatible, but it does not displace any copies of Redhat sold with our product. So, while Redhat may be losing some marketshare for inhouse deployments, they are only losing cusotomers that didn't want the support or that they were essentially *lying* to by requiring them to purchase licenses they were not obligated to purchase.
You might ask just as well why the Linux community tolerates RedHat.
It's the way it's supposed to work.
On the other hand, the only reason why CentOS exists is that RHEL can't be downloaded for free like the older versions. If RedHat wanted to kill CentOS they would just have to allow that.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Redhat doesn't have to distribute the packaging or configuration information to satisfy the gpl. For example, they could provide a cvs or svn repository with just the code or tarballs of the source. The gpl would be satisfied, but it'd be very difficult to recreate the configuration information required to get a working system. E.g. the selinux policies required to get a working system would take a fairly large project in and of itself.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Red Hat probably realises that people using CentOS are people who may just like it so much they they come back for more, and since they don't make their money on the software, but rather supporting it, CentOS just means more potential customers in the long run...
Some companies are control freaks who prefer to sue potential customers, Red Hat has picked a slightly more sane aproach.
In the early days, MS gave the impression of tolerating piracy. Whether they did or not it's widely believed it helped them more than it hurt them. Centos is not piracy but it can help Redhad spread itself.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are all competing brands under the same umbrella. Fedora is great for cutting edge developers and home users. CentOS is good for people who desire the better tested software. RHEL is targeted at enterprises (hence the 'E' in the acronym) who need things working all the time (99.9999%). The three different markets are comparable to the different brands offered by Microsoft (Server, Workstation, Home). The only difference is that Red Hat doesn't make any money from CentOS or Fedora.
But take a step back and think about Microsoft a bit more. Imagine you have a business laptop which was provided to you by your company. It runs 2000 or XP or (god forbid) Vista and the company has a site license for you to run that software. Microsoft is happy to slash margins for the individual site license which you have as long as they can continue to service the servers and infrastructure which run the business critical systems of your company. Similarly, if you are a developer or home user... your copy of Windows came from an OEM or you pirated it. Sure, Microsoft gets money from Dell and the other OEMs... but (I imagine) so do the Linux companies who have been able to get involved in that method of distribution.
In the end, you help Red Hat by using CentOS or Fedora just like you help Microsoft by using pirated Windows. Simple enough?
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Cheaper than hiring a guy.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
RHEL also provides the RHN which is a powerful framework for managing updates for large quantities of machines, among other things.
CentOS provides an audience for bug reporting and even a source for patches. Closing the source to RHEL customers only may be possible (is that legal?), but the'll pay a price. The mega enterpise is RHELs market and CentOS won't hurt that market much.
This comment especially for those clever asses who will say "because they have to!" before reading the article: the author is not contending that Red Hat could somehow prevent CentOS from being made. He is wondering why Red Hat doesn't provide a low-cost, no-support, barebones edition of Red Hat to try and take some of the CentOS user share. And he has a fairly good answer to the question, too.
What a great basis to bash an organization...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Not only does Redhat 'tolerate' CentOS (see above), it also puts money into encouraging people to use Fedora, which is not only free but generally significantly more advanced than RHEL. For people who want free software and enjoy recompiling their kernel, Fedora is a much more obvious choice than a clone of CentOS.
There was never any money in selling distros to dorm-room techies, and RHEL was never a good distribution for that market, because it's so conservative. I run Ubuntu on my desktop machines, because it's free, and it works, and it has all the multimedia stuff that RedHat don't ship as standard. On my company's production servers it's RHEL every time, because it's stable, because it will still be supported in 5 years' time if necessary, and because RHEL is a de facto standard in hosting terms. If a client's code doesn't work with RHEL, we can tell them to fix their code. If we were running some wacky, customised version of Gentoo they'd tell us to fix our server (whether or not anything was broken).
Running CentOS would give us the conservatism of RHEL without any of the respectability. I can't see how that would be useful to us.
Virtually serving coffee
Redhat in my opinion has been the Microsoft of Linux distros. I worked at a large company with a large online presence, and a problem in the TCP/IP stack of the RHEL we were using was causing us problems, mostly long random networking pauses. Our guys tracked it down, devised a fix, and asked if Redhat would look into rolling it into their next RHEL release. They said no. Before we found out the cause, they dragged their heels in investigating it too.
So obviously, we asked why we were paying for support we obviously weren't getting. And we started the switch to Centos ( since our software could run on it ) along with investigating other linux distros.
You pay alot for official RH support, like MS, get little in return.
Think of it this way...Much like Apple doesnt make their money off of OS X, but rather off of hardware sales, Redhat also doesnt make their money off RHL, but rather from their support contracts.
1) Its open source, its not a question of tolerating Centos, its the way open source works.
2) The anecdotal evidence is seriously flawed. His buddy was running an old and unsupported version of Red Hat Linux (7.3), and they were not paying for a service subscription, and they decided to go with Centos and continue to not pay for a support subscription. Uhh, clue here, this did not effect Red Hat in any way, they are not Red Hat's target market, if it wasn't Centos it would have been some other distro.
3) And again, the conclusion is completely clueless. Red Hat does not change the way they do business becuase their business is based on open source. If Red Hat decided to develop their own closed source proprietary operating system they would lose the support and synergy of the massive open source community and their business would flop.
These articles are tiresome and poorly researched. Why is it that everyone believes the only way to have a viable business today is to create a monopoly and change the way you do business to ensure there is no competition that can "sting" you. Red Hat is doing an outstanding job of monetizing a viable market, linux service, support, and training. If Jeff wants to understand why Red Hat does not change their business model all he has to do is read up on the history of Caldera/The SCO Group to see what happens when a linux distributor changes their business model and tries to monetize off the "IP" instead of the service and support they were originally established to provide as a business model.
burnin
They are nice guys
CentOS is actually significantly better than RHEL in one respect, though. The package management system, yum, has always been more reliable for me than RHEL's up2date. Even now that RH uses yum, their reposistories seem to be down or slow fairly often. And I can't stand using RHEL's web site. It's much faster to deploy a CentOS server than a Red Hat one, enough so that the price difference seems almost secondary. On the other hand, if you install a lot of machines, you shouldn't be doing it from scratch.
Eh, but Red Hat's done far more good things than bad things. I think CentOS (and to a lesser extent, White Box and others) have a nice symbiotic relationship with them. Some users will prefer or need officially supported software, and that's why they're still turning nice, but not monopolistic insane profits. It would be a mistake to think that they'd get many of the CentOS users if they could only work around that pesky GPL and force them to buy from Redhat. Quite the opposite; they'd ruin themselves.
Nobody will read this since its at the bottom of the page, but lots of major software vendors will not provide support on CentOS.
For example, Oracle will only provide support if its installed on the RHEL version of Linux.
My IT department isn't concerned about the support involved with Linux, but they DO want to make sure they are supported for the big dollar, and incredibly important (data!) side of the business--so they pay for RHEL for production servers.
In test and development arenas we use CentOS.
"Where is my mind?"
From TFA:
Until fairly recently they ran this web site on an old version of Red Hat with essentially no outside support.and:
But even if they run RHEL on a mix of two and four socket machines, they're still looking at $50K per year minimum for the privilege of sticking the little red logo on their servers.From what I gather (and I haven't been awake very long, so I might be wrong) they've been maintaining Linux boxes on their own for years (about 5, IIRC Redhat 7.3 came out 2002-ish), and the reason they're ditching Redhat is it costs too much for support they didn't need previously? If I might go on a limb and make a bizarre suggestion: Don't pay it.
They know that the engineering effort at Red Hat costs serious money and that someone has to pay for itI don't really think this is that true. I was under the impression (and unless this is wrong too) RHEL forked off Fedora whenever they feel like it, so in effect (according to this) isn't Fedora just a testbed where people do free QA work for Redhat?
My friend and his staff are Unix veterans, but they are not Linux geeks and they are definitely not the kind to muck around in the innards of their server OS just for the fun of it.So they're UNIX veterans, have been administering Linux systems for years, and they haven't mastered './configure && make && make install'? TFA claims they're LAMP-based, with the exception of the L, I can start on the AMP portion first thing in the morning and have all three upgraded in time for lunch (My day starts at 10, Lunch is noon without fail). Sounds to me like they're just too lazy to upgrade the 2 or 3 dependencies something might have. That's a great reason for ditching a known good and stable kernel, right?
Hell, the first thing I do when I install a new OS is replace their Apache/MySQL/PHP with versions I compile myself (based on known-good versions we use on staging/test servers), that way I know 100% it's going to do what I want and I'm not going to see any crap in my error logs about PHP not loading it's GD extension because I opted not to install X on a server which really doesn't need it.
If they really wanted set-it-and-forget-it why not use Slackware? Or ditch Linux entirely and go to FreeBSD?
Sometimes people hurt my head.
My company, which is not so small (some hundreds employees, some hundreds millions Euro revenue/year, growing fast), uses CentOS (as well as RHEL) because it's cheaper, the cost difference is noticeable. We also use MySQL partly because it's cheaper. But we also like the ability to deploy rapidly, and not have to manage licenses, and so on, and we do pay for MySQL support and RHEL support when we use it.
Not all companies consider $10k Oracle licenses to be an inevitable cost of business, nor having to have people to track the licensing to be an inevitable drag.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
I still believe that the reason why Microsoft software is so widely used is because of the piracy or the economics of piracy that surround Microsoft products.
It is a natural extension to get your product into as many hands as possible and then collect on all of the "possibilities" that might develop.
For example, if you do not economically restrict the number of machines that you can deploy a product on, this naturally creates a demand for software from the creation of such a large number of users.
That is just one example, but I think this is a big postive move for RedHat.
Fedora can be equated in a similar fashion.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Because RedHat have always been a good citizen in the Linux world, that's why. They use GPL code, and they release their developments under the GPL. Like any good Linux distro, you can compile any of the Redhatified binaries from the Redhatified source and install them as RedHat packages. That's because their distro is fully open, just like it should be.
Of course, that means anyone can copy it, and they know that. That's why they don't really sell Linux as such. What they really sell is support. You can't copy that for free.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The benefit to the end user of using a Red Hat clone rather than Red Hat is that it's a well supported ecosystem within the larger Linux ecosystem. The benefit to Red Hat of an end user using a Red Hat clone rather than another Linux distro is that it increases the size of the Red Hat ecosystem.
If someone buys Red Hat's supported linux product, they're buying it for the support. That's the product Red Hat is really selling. If someone uses CentOS or Fedora or White Box they're more likely to buy support from Red Hat if they need a supported Linux. If someone uses C/F/WB they're potential customers for other companies that serve the Red Hat ecosystem, which increases the number of companies it can support and makes Red Hat's supported Linux more attractive. And Red Hat don't even have to pay the bandwidth charges for all the extra downloads if someone chooses CentOS or White Box instead of Fedora.
It's coopetition. One hand washes the other.
In short, RH go beyond mere due diligence and strict adherence to the GPL. They really do make an effort.
To me this looks like healthy symbiosis: CentOS don't name RH as their upstream, so they don't trade off Red Hat's advertising. Folks who want a free-as-in-beer OS weren't going to buy the RHEL license anyhow. But people who are used to CentOS will be more inclined to favour RHEL as a product. By creating a user community, it also stimulates the creation of repositories of RHEL-compatible third party RPM repositories. I doubt there'd be such a volume of RHEL-compatible RPMs (as currently provided by various CentOS repositories) if it wasn't for the existance of a freely available derivative of RHEL.
A combination of collaboration in development, free advertising, ease of customisation and mutual benefits, whilst still making money - sounds like a fine example of the Open Source game being played well, as long as they can make it pay for them long term!
How do you make sure that CentOS really is identical to what RedHat has provided? In other words, is there an automatic validation process to make sure some joker somwhere in the chain of distribution hasn't thrown in some strange code?
What I believe _is_ hurting redhat is how their sales department insists that making copies of Redhat is illegal. We have been told time and time again that it is illegal for us to run copies of Redhat that are not paid for within our support contract. The truth is- as long as you aren't expecting support for the unpaid for copies and you are not selling them to other companies (alone or as part of your product, because of redhat trademarks) it is fine to use as many in-house copies as you want.
Are you sure about that? Compilations can be copyrighted too (phonebooks, etc). Just because all the individual parts of RHEL are Free/Open Source (Are they?? All of them?? You sure?? All docs too? Everything on the CD? Otherwise it's copyright infringement you know) doesn't mean you can make as many copies of the whole RHEL CD as you like. Besides, when you install RHEL on multiple machines, do you get security updates on all those machines? In that case, you might be using a service without paying for it.. Now, it may be that the examples I've named above don't apply in this case, but nonetheless, you're on a slippery slope making/installing copies when RedHat tells you you can't. You'd be wise to listen to their sales department, unless your company lawyer said it was okay.
You're spot-on.
My startup is running Centos on our servers. If we couldn't easily get that for $0.00, we'd be using something else. We're not rich or stupid enough to run a server that's not free-as-in-{speech,beer}.
The non-revenue Redhat-based systems are the only thing that's keeping Redhat's systems relevant, for an awful lot of us. Even when Redhat was The Linux Distribution To Use, most people used it through the free download, not the $50 boxed set.
It's great if you can make money off free software -- more power to ya -- but if you don't make it easy for cheap people like me to run it for $0.00, you won't be selling those expensive versions for long, either.
I ran RedHat Linux (not enterprise) for years on a few servers, and cheerfully paid the subscription fees for RedHat network (something like $30 a year or something) just because it was easy.
I knew that RedHat's main focus was on Enterprise, which was total overkill for what I needed. Still, I also knew that they were making a profit on RedHat Linux - not a huge profit, but a profit nonetheless. I figured I could continue running RH Linux on my small servers for a long time, paying my subscription fees and everyone would be happy.
Well, some beancounters at RedHat made a lot of noise about "brand dilution" or some such crap, rightfully pointing out that one nice big enterprise customer is worth about 10000 little customers like me (true). The same beancounters then made a decision that since I could get RH Linux cheap that it somehow made RHEL less attractive as a "brand" or some such marketing doublespeak - rather doubtful, but hey, it sounds impressive in a board meeting I guess.
What happened? They end-of-lifed RedHat Linux extremely abruptly, I think within MONTHS, not years of the release of RedHat 9. They left me in a position where I had to go from telling clients, "oh, yeah, Linux is great, we set up the server, monitor it and update it every now and then, but mostly we just leave it alone" to telling clients, "uh, yeah, this is going to go away real soon so I need to upgrade all those servers that I told you we wouldn't have to make changes to for years."
Well, damn. They betrayed me. They sold a decent product at a fair price, and I assumed that practice would continue. Silly me. They could have at least given me a decent lifecycle on the last release - hell, even Microsoft supports an operating system for a minimum of five years - but no....
I talked to customers about Redhat being an affordable, decent product, and they made me look like an ass. I don't forget that.
Now, many hardware manufacturers out there only support RedHat. And while RHEL is boring as hell, it's also stable as hell. It's a good product, but they are clearly not interested in catering to small customers. And CentOS is big enough that I can call Dell and say, "I have a Linux server" and they'll say "We only support Redhat" and I'll say, "Well, I'm running CentOS, the clone of RHEL."
And Dell says, "Sounds good to us. How can we help you?"
I think Redhat made a giant mistake back in 2003 when they dumped all us little guys.
Sure, they have several nice big giant customers shoveling cash at them. But they could have kept the little guys too, a multitude of them, and STILL made a profit on the low-cost subscriptions they were selling us. Big corporations throwing cash at you is all well and good, but when you're going up against Microsoft, which is as much a political battle as a financial battle there's something to be said for strength in numbers. And there's something to be said for goodwill, which RedHat squandered.
Don't even get me started on Fedora. Nice to play with, but I can't install an OS with a six-month or year lifecycle in a production environment.
Redhat pissed on me and thousands of other small customers, when it would have cost them NOTHING to keep us. We don't forget. It's sad, really. I still try to keep up with RedHat sometimes. I registered for a RedHat seminar and someone from RedHat called me up to ask about my perception of RedHat and I started trying to explain why I could no longer trust RedHat. They didn't seem to know what I was talking about. They were most likely wondering, "if this guy dislikes us so much why is he attending a RedHat seminar?"
I didn't feel like explaining it's because I use CentOS. Occasionally I'll sell a server to a customer and include a "donation amount" on the invoice, which I subsequently pass on to the CentOS project. It would be easier, slightly, I suppose to use the old RedHat Network basic subscription model - I wouldn't have to explain to customers why there's a "donation" field on their invoice instead of a "support contract" field - but hey, that's life.
I tend to agree that CentOS isn't likely to hurt Red Hat's RHEL sales. In fact, like Fedora, CentOS is likely to help Red Hat in the long run.
For example, I run Fedora on my desktop and CentOS on personal or non-profit servers. However, the company at which I work would never
consider using a free/community distro. So when it comes time to install server software at work, I can recommend what I know (Red Hat systems)
with a price tag and the support that makes them feel comfortable.
Red Hat gets the dollars from the big business and I get a free desktop OS, so everyone wins.
Keep in mind that Red Hat has done very well financially over the past few years. Since they dropped their
offical free version, their stock has soared. I cant' see them being unhappy about that.
In my opinion, CentOS actually helps Red Hat. I work as Linux admin, and in all the companies I've worked so far, we usually choose to run RHEL for the Oracle machines and CentOS for all the others.
We choose RHEL for the Oracle machines because it's the platform Oracle supports, and the cost of RHEL is insignificant near to the cost of Oracle, so it's not worth to install CentOS and then have a support request dismissed from Oracle because it's running on a non-supported platform.
On the other hand, for everything else, we basically support it ourselves, or google for answers when we have problems. Although the Red Hat support is very good, we actually don't need it, we're really OK on our own.
But Red Hat actually benefits from we using CentOS, because as we can use CentOS for most of our machines, we'll turn to Red Hat when we need a supported platform, as we do with Oracle machines, and we don't even look at SuSE or others because we're already using (more or less) Red Hat, so we mostly know it well already.
In any way, if CentOS weren't there, for the non-Oracle machines we would probably use Fedora, or even try Ubuntu. Yes, it would be different, but we'd prefer to do that than pay for RHEL licenses. And if we started looking to the other side, say, Ubuntu, or even OpenSuSE, as soon as we saw that we could get good Oracle support with Ubuntu or even buy SuSE, we would probably switch from RHEL, because then we would be able to unify (more or less) the platform.
So, in the long term, I guess CentOS actually helps Red Hat, in allowing people to get used to Red Hat and deploy it without spending much in licenses, and then turning to Red Hat whenever they have the need to buy licenses to a supported OS.
I'm going to have to go with "doesn't hurt Red Hat" on many counts.
Then there's the PHB factor. The mid-level manager mindful that no one ever lost their job buying Microsoft. Many would pay the RHEL license cost just to have a throat to choke in the event something goes wrong. I've heard that discussion with my own ears. Decision makers wanting to know who was on the hook if something went bad.
If RedHat itself fielded an exact, unbranded, unsupported copy I bet many companies would still opt for the support licenses. Most companies just don't get open source.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The fact that Red Hat do alright by selling software which is available and accessible costfree to anyone, means that the assumptions made in this article (and by much of the proprietary software industry) are obsolete.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
This is the whole point of the GNU GPL.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Was this guy born yesterday? The reason RH "conviently" provides the source code on their FTP site is because they are REQUIRED to under the term of the GPL. RH didn't write all their software and still don't. They built a business from offering support for software they packaged. Is CentOS hurting RH? WTF RedHat wouldn't exist if it wasn't for projects like CentOS to begin with. I work for an Open Source company. This guy is operating under some big time misconceptions. The product is not the software, the product is Red Hat's expertise. If you don't need it, don't buy it.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
The question "Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS?" presumes that Red Hat has any choice in the matter. They don't, at least not with respect to all of the open source code in RHEL, and they know better than to include significant non-free components in their OS. Even if it didn't go against their own principles, it would generate a great deal of bad publicity for them.
Red Hat does have one type of intellectual property which they can enforce against CentOS, trademarks. And Red Hat *does* enforce its trademarks, so vigorously that CentOS is extremely careful never to mention Red Hat or use any image that looks anything like a hat. Red Hat does do everything they can to shut down CentOS -- it's just that "everything they can" isn't much.
Aside from that, I think it's pretty clear that CentOS doesn't hurt Red Hat much, and might even benefit Red Hat in lots of cases, but none of that has any bearing on the question in the first sentence of the article.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS?"
Because the GPL requires that they do so.
Centos is great and definitely helps drive Redhat on to enterprise. We run mainly Centos on our production systems with Redhat licenses on all the big gear. If Centos wasn't an option we'd run whatever the next most stable free os was and probably get comfortable with *that* then start paying them licenses for the big gear. Centos helps fill a void that keeps Redhat squarely on the radar for business. If we didn't have this option we wouldn't use Redhat at all.
Quack, quack.
If anything it is helping redhat get more people to test their software...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork" It is sad that so many of you are "ok" with this. RH does 99.999% of the work and CentOS takes it all and rebrands it and that is about it. Nice. I guess you would consider that a "benefit" of the GPL.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but I am really thinking about entering the journalism turf. It seems like an easy job. No reality check, no knowledge of business logic. You just write and you get paid. At least that's what many of them do.
I mean has he ever wondered about why would someone pay a license for... anything? Maybe ... support? Has he ever heard of Oracle? Or SAP? Does he even have a clue what platforms these software manufacturers support?
I know many said the same thing. But I am not arguing about the premise of the article, rather how come an article like that gets published and even worse, how come it's posted here.
The only competitor to Red Hat is Novell, period. Maybe Ubuntu will join in the future. In other words the sky is blue and water is still refreshing. So... where's my money?
In one way, GPL allows anyone to use the sources of any GPL O/S to 'build' a new O/S, as long as all copyrighted material is left out.
This has allowed a few people to 're-release' the combination/dependency/compatibility work of a commercial GPL O/S
In another way, it has also allowed another company (a certain Database company comes to mind) to do exactly the same thing.
All the original company can do (and did) is to tell the people that they have a deeper understanding of the O/S itself.
Internal knowledge, it seems, is unfakeable.
Technically, Red Hat would prefer home-coders to use Fedora Core.
That way the home coders have access to all the latest Linux Bling (Yippee!) and Red Hat has a large testing crowd,
to see how well all those Bling features work out in the 'real world'.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is, essentially, a (previous) version of Fedora Core that has proven itself to be rock-solid.
On the other hand (like the post above), CentOS allows people to have a good look at RHEL without having to request a temporary 'test licence'
(Yes they are available on request, you just have to dig a little deeper to find them).
On the subject of Red Hat actually tolerating CentOS, I have spoken to some people of RH and they seem to get along
rather well with the CentOS people.
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
The fact that they exist further exemplifies Red Hat's goals and mission in FOSS.
If people want enterprise support on RHL based systems they can simply opt for RHEL.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Whenever I use Redhat (which is every gawddam day), it feels like I have gone back about 3 years in time. They are so far behind the feature curve it is really annoying the hell out of me. Redhat is a middle aged Linux - everything is slower and more painful...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
RHEL is about support and custom code fixes, not about selling a boxed software product
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The main reason we want Red Hat support now if for JBoss support, and for access to Red Hat CD's and packages. Also we have a goal of having all our systems patched with the latest necessary patches, and want support for that. Finally, if our server crashes on systems which are Red Hat certified, we might want to send the crash dump to Red Hat and our hardware vendor to find out why our system crashed.
Our systems are not all patched, but on another note, are fairly stable. However, if I was in a different enterprise, I would want to know that if there was a serious and persistent problem affecting stability, that if that was sent back up the pipeline it would be worked on. For the hardware supplier, be it Dell or HP/Compaq, I would expect they would fix the problem, and on the OS side, if something was causing the system to crash on that end, that Red Hat would be able to push the stability fix into the kernel - or at least be aware of it and have a patch for it so we would be unaffected.
Say what you will about Eric S. Raymond. His writings in the cathedral and the bazaar have some strength to it, if you are to believe neo-OSS acolyte Jonathan Schwartz of Sun who often refers to this segment when defending their share price.
It is applicable it the case of RedHat vs. CentOS as well.
RedHat does *not* hate CentOS... the issue has come up on the mailing lists over the years, and some see CentOS as the "gateway drug" that eventually brings more users to RHEL. Others feel that having CentOS around increases the RHEL{,-derived} userbase and therefore indirectly helps increase the quality of RHEL itself.
In fact, CentOS and Fedora shared a developer booth at FOSDEM this year.
http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Fosdem2007
http://spevack.livejournal.com/2007/02/25/
Additionally, it would have taken the author of TFA about 10 minutes of reasearch to turn up the FOSDEM tidbit and these little bits that make TFA completely irrelevant:
http://www.linux.com/?module=comments&func=display&cid=1161341
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=511
(scroll down to the RH Q&A) on the second link.
I may have to share this planet with animals, but I'm doing my damn best to eat every last one of them.
Folks who use CentOS are mostly the folks who wouldn't pay RedHat anyway. And folks who want to pay RedHat are the kind who want just the sort of hand-holding that RedHat offers. They're targeting two different market segments.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
THere, in the subject, is my whole point. RHEL's sales are pushed by the certified apps it runs. It is used to kick Unix out, not to compete with other linuxes.
I dont think centos hurts redhat at all. Now if oracle wanted to hurt, instead of pursuing their rather measly attempt at a rhel clone, they would support centos.
NO SIG
If you had to pick between RHEL and SLES, which would be a better choice. Sure, you can install SLES on a unlimited number of workstations for free. Now try and patch those copies after 30 days.
CentOS lets RHEL customers install an OS they can patch on their dev testing boxes, and only buy licenses for the boxes that need support.
Andy
CentOS is made and maintained by F5 Networks (Seattle) as the distribution they use in their "Big IP" product. It's a pure Business to Business fuck-you because F5 Networks doesn't want you to know they are to cheap to pay for what they use, but they aren't too cheap to pay a bunch of guys to clone Red Hat.
Typical war tactic, divide and conquer.
Only problem with this is that the License is very clear and eliminates such possibilities.
As is well known in the OSS industry, you make money off of support.
I'm sure there is more to RedHat distros that was not developed in house as there was in house development.
And that is the benefit of and to RedHat.
Is there an echo in here?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Isn't this what Linux and the GPL are all about? That is why Red Hat tolerates CentOS, because they agreed to the GPL when they created their own Linux distribution. As long as CentOS removes the front-end trademarks, it seems to me the GPL applies.
Doesn't Red Hat derive a benefit from CentOS. Maybe a business running CentOS (like that described in the article) gets over its head in configuring or managing a CentOS server, and the moves to RHEL with paid support.
Red hat refuses to ship anything that's no GPL'd, so it seems like their short on luck if someone chooses to ship the same thing for free.
They already do a pretty good job of making it impossible to download the distro in binary form from their website for free, so I think they've done about as much as they legally can.
Really, if a distro doesn't want to be undercut in this way, they need to be willing to add on closed source parts of their distro that can't be sold by someone else in this way. Suze does this, as does Xandros. Realistically, Suze may not have the best distro right now, but in the long run they have the better business model and have been more aggressive about pursuing new technologies (like mono and xen) and will probably beat red hat out of the market.
I've been hearing this "throat to choke" meme circulate for twenty years, yet I've never managed to form a concrete image of it working out as advertised.
In fact, working mostly for very small companies, I've never seen any throat of upstream vendor take as much as a deep gulp. Even with fairly expensive software products, you still get a junior tech who usually insists for the first week (or more), despite comprehensive technical attachments to the contrary, that somehow you aren't using the expensive product correctly, because a product that expensive made by such a large and powerful corporation with such a long history couldn't possibly be that incredibly broken.
A recent nightmare that comes to mind was the Xilinx ISE Webpack ignoring pin constraints, claiming in most outputs to have satisfied them, but if you dug down deep enough, you could find a report that told you where the pin was actually bound. Of course, Webpack ISE is not an example of an expensive support contract, but even so, Xilinx has a $7B market cap., with a long history, and if they can't get something this basic correct, what exactly has their corporate stature done for you?
By the time the error in our prototype system was detected and fixed with much recriminations and pulling of hair, the damage was done, we had discovered our own work-around tweaking the source code, and what was to be gained by turning the thumb screw on Xilinx? In small companies, I've rarely had the level of support where I could choke a throat without first filling out an application form. Oh, the primal satisfaction.
In the cases where I've seen expensive support prove its worth at an engineering level, the companies involved have a deep enough business relationship to fly engineers back and forth for training, support, and knowledge exchange. Any support contract below this tier, no matter what metalic luster is applied by the marketrons, has good odds to waste more time and talent than it salvages. The exception where it can pay off is for orgs (esp. high-powered revolving-door consulting orgs) that hire at the bottom of the experience pool, people who can't actually use the software correctly, and where the money you save by hiring unqualified workers pays for the expensive support, with the added bonus that your unqualified workers acquire portable skills far more slowly than if they ever solved a problem themselves.
Where I have seen the implied law-of-the-jungle "choke the throat" aggression play out is mid-level a-hats in development meetings insinuate "we are paying tons of support money on this expensive support contract from this powerful company, so how come you can't get it to work?" This only serves to nourish all the standard corporate dysfunctions, drives the wedge between marketing and development ever deeper, mandates CYA behaviour from every quarter, and tilts the landscape in favour of those whose job descriptions are primarily political in nature over those who have technical obligations to complete, and who can't play politics on a full-time basis. What's not to like?
I've heard this meme for twenty years--usually tendered by the fetishists of corporate jargon--and I'm still asking myself "whose neck is actually being choked here?" It has always struck me that the primary function of these contracts is to make it easier for the suits to denigrate the geeks.
Here is a telling observation. When is the last time any bean-counting suit ever asked "did we get our money from that support contract or not?" Of course they got their value: the empowerment to drip condescension toward their technical staff over every snag and delay. "Of course these problems are not a management failure, we bought the gold platinum titanium support package from every vendor we sourced. It must be our own clunkhead engineers who can't get anything right."
Fedora fills the void left by RH9. Whether you agree it does a good job of it or not is another issue, but the purpose of Fedora is to 1) be a testing ground for new stuff that will eventually end up in RHEL and 2) serve as a good "community" desktop focused OS.
I run Fedora as we speak, and I have run RedHat since 6.0.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That said I think that Enterprise systems are pretty terrible and I've never really liked Red Hat's product. But that's a story for another time.
The article is quite right that RHEL is a "top of the line" corporate support platform. Button downed IT professionals at large banks and businesses buy RHEL, probably never even looking at the price.
Back in RedHat 9.0 days, they had support and free versions. The free version under cut their commercial version. With RHEL, Cent OS provides the perfect answer. RedHat *has* a free version of its REHL that does not dilute its commercial offerings.
As said in other posts, CentOS (which I use) helps RedHat because it is essentially RHEL. Bugs I find get fixed in RHEL. Apps I develop for CentOS are RHEL ready.
I can't see how RedHat loses anything with CentOS. Each customer has a calculated cost. Reduce the numer of customers while maintaining the same income level means more profit. (In general, there are always some exceptions).
Me: We're trying to install Xenix on ESDI, and it goes into a loop at the first bad sector.
Support: First I'll need you to install a fresh copy of Xenix.
Me: But that's what were trying to do!
Support: Look, I can't help you unless if you're not willing to follow my instructions.
Me: (Loses it and yells insults into the phone ... )
We went back to ST506 for the moment, ditched SCO, and signed up as a Motorola var to sell 68k unix systems...
We use CentOS because it's free. If their was no CentOS, we'd use Debian or something else. We describe it to our customers as a free community version of RedHat, some of our customers will then opt on their own to request we use the official RedHat and pay extra for it. If we did Debian, that would probably not happen.
When I worked at RH, I never heard anyone say anything bad about CentOS. CentOS is a good community member. As they rebuild and test packages, they find lots of bugs themselves. They either fix it themselves and send the patches upstream to RH, or file bug reports. Again, it's like having free QA.
And RHEL is after a different market than CentOS. RHEL is for companies that need the insurance of support. These companies need to know that if something goes wrong, someone will be there to help them fix it, or come out and fix it. Sure, you might be able to get someone on a community mailing list to solve the problem, but that kind of support is kind of hit and miss. You need better insurance than that if you've got projects being delayed because of a major issue.
CentOS also has the benefit that the rising generation of geeks without $$$$ can get experience using a RHEL-like OS. So when they start working for big companies who need RHEL, they already have all the expertise they need.
RHEL also has some things that don't make it out to CentOS. RHEL's Satellite Server is nothing short of amazing when it comes to managing large networks of RHEL boxes. They took their up2date server, which all RHEL boxes register with to get updates, and then made that a separate product. So instead of RHEL boxes registering with RH, they can register with their own satellite server to get updates. And with that, they've added all sorts of provisioning options, so you can push out all the updates from the server. Or you can have a group of computers all be installed, upgraded, downgraded, etc, without having to physically visit each system or even manually log into each one. You can control everything from the satellite server.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
I can kind of see why Red Hat would get pissed off, seeing as how they spend all this time and energy creating their distro, then someone else just recompiles it and takes credit for it... oh, and rips out all the stuff identifying it as the Red Hat distro.
I wonder how people would feel if someone just recompiled Ubuntu and just ripped out any reference to it. Seeing as how Ubuntu is now the Lunix distro flavor of the month, I'm guessing the darling of Slashdot would get quite a spirited defense.
Red Hat's only crime is expecting to get credit for their work from the FOSS community.
Working in webhosting support I get many clients who run RHEL on their server simply because it was provided as a choice by the datacenter where they lease their server(s). There is no price difference between the OS's they choose from during their server sign-up; so it's plausible that they could choose any one of several OS's which may or may not free to the general public. The RHEL boxes commonly are registered via a satellite service that is provided by the datacenter themselves and the user never has to pay for this part separately. It seems that this type of free provisioning of the OS would do the same amount of damage as a clone like CentOS.
There is nothing in the Trademark law that prevents CentOS from truthfully describing where they got the source of the distribution from. Red Hat is attempting to expand Trademark protection to places it was never meant to cover, and in that regard it is as bad as the last of the proprietary vendors.
And you know it.
In fact, just like proprietary vendors, you had some versions where you had to click "I agree" to the preposterous "trademark use agreement". Just like we do for proprietary vendors, I have to ask you: Why do you want to shift the protection from trademark to contract law? Is it because you actually know that trademark law does not allow you to demand what you demand?
Shachar
IANAL, but I did consult one about this point in the past.
1. "waaaah, centos makes redhat RHEL more accessible"
2. "waaaah, redhat should do something about centos mmmkay?"
3. "waaaah, redhat is bad mmmkay??"
4. "waaaah, none of the other distro's have a chance to supplant rhel because centos is free".
And you wonder why redhat do nothing about centos? seriously??? I dont mean that because of his comments. But from a RHEL perspective everyone wins. RHEL get someone else to distribute a version of their OS that they dont have to support but comes with all the other bonus's of running RHEL. When a customer can afford it they move to RHEL for reasons that make sense to them. At the end of th day, ragardless of whether your running RHEL or CentosOS - your still running an OS who's ideals are wrapped around RHEL's. Which gives RedHat alot of leeway in things that wrap around RHEL (like enterprise desktop maybe?) "yeah, our enterprise destkops work with centos, just dont ask us to support your centos servers, but here's a migration strategy...".
I think people go with RedHat because they want someone else to be responsible for the support. People don't get the level of professional support in CentOS, so businesses are more likely to go with RHEL. Having said that, my work place recently moved over rather a number of servers to CentOS from RHEL. The licensing fees are probably quite a bit, especially if you don't need the support.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov
I just got up so I probably still have too much blood in my caffeine :-)
/dev/sdb was absent which sort of screwed things up for mirroring :-). Don't think I tried CentOS then.
:-).
:-).
:).
3. Here's a question: why is there no CentOS equivalent based on SuSE products? Think about it.
What about OpenSuSE?
Having said that, I did have to work with SLES 9 for a while and it's not an experience I want to repeat. Ever. Well, OK, unless the alternative is Worries for Windows or Windows ME. But even then. OpenSuSE is quite pleasant to work with, barring the apparent risk of Microsoft proximity.
Since I appear to hear from an expert, here's a question: where are the OS controls in CentOS/Red Hat? In SuSE you've got a thing called YAST which you can access via command line as well as GUI, and it pretty much does anything except EVMS setup or make coffee (which I need right now, dang) - I used to use RH until I found just how easy it was to manage a SuSE box (I'm usually too short on time to mine manuals too often). I looked at Fedora but discovered that the latest version would NOT work correctly on the HP DL 230 server I had (it only saw one SATA disk, for some reason
My needs are simple: I need a box which acts as a file server, email and LAMP engine (and Postgresql) for a couple of domains I'm playing with (Postfix, and access to mailboxes via IMAPs). It may also act as a KDE/Gnome desktop when I'm doing something mad with the desktop I use. Firewall and VPN duties will soon be taken care of by a Smoothwall box when I find a box small enough
The argument for this change is that I'm trying to get a couple of things online in a fashion stable enough not to worry about it for a year other than the daily security patching (and I'm happy with that being automated, as long as the backup has worked correctly beforehand
If I switch the main OS over I may cut over to Fedora on the desktops as well. I like Ubuntu but I tend to use desktops for trying out things that I subsequently put on a server (like groupware) which is simply easier by using the same platform.
Any help appreciated, I'm already breaking out the IRC clients
Insert
CentOS is just taking what Red Hat gave away for free and does something with it, just like what Red Hat did with the hundreds of packages they collected. Customers get what they pay for too. For free you get no support and nobody to sue.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We've used CentOS on our app servers for a while now and were going to use it on our DB servers as well until we called $DB_VENDOR asking about CentOS support. They acknowledged that it's functionally identical to RHEL, but that really didn't matter: they'd tested on RHEL, Suse, and Ubuntu, so that's what they support. We have quite a lot invested in CentOS expertise already, so RHEL it had to be. After all, if your production DB is down you can't have tech support hanging up on you when they find out you're on an "unsupported" distro, right?
So even though there are no foreseeable Linux problems we couldn't solve on our own, we'll be running fully supported RHEL 5 on our DB servers. Hell, even with the maxicare RHEL package our support costs are about a tenth what they were for $PROPRIETARY_PLATFORM.
But RHEL will only be on the production DB servers. Everything else will continue to be CentOS.
This is not my sandwich.
My servers run Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch amd64. If for any reason I couldn't get Debian and I wanted a RedHat-like distro, then I would examine CentOS. If it suited me, then I would examine the pure RedHat. But if I couldn't get CentOS, then there would be absolutely no chance of even thinking about RedHat.
To summarise... If I were a CentOS user I would be willing to consider RHEL, but if there were no CentOS I would *never* buy RHEL. I wouldn't get RHEL even if it, its updates, and its support were offered for free.
Let me explain my reasoning as a user: RHEL is supported by a company. CentOS is supported by a community. Companies may die or bought by a bigger company and leave their users unsupported. Communities, while having no obligation to support the users, tend to live on and almost never die. "Dead" communities are usually just replaced by a new more vibrant one. The reason is that communities are formed because of the needs of developers and users, so for as long as users have the same needs there will always be communities covering these needs. Companies, however, are usually formed for profit, so if you have obscure needs that cannot bring profits to an enterprise then you may be unable to buy a commercial solution to your needs. A company can cease its operations for various reasons. This can't happen with a community. With an active CentOS community around, this means that upgrading to the enterprise support offered by RedHat is safe: Even if RedHat can't support me, I can always just revert back to CentOS and carry on my business as before with no changes. But if CentOS didn't exist, then getting RedHat would mean that you would assume the risk of having business continuity problems if your support provider went out of business etc. With CentOS around acting as a backup, RedHat is a much more safer choice.
Let's use an actual example: I still have a Commodore 64 home micro from the 1980s with its sexy tape drive, but Commodore is no more and doesn't support this old model anymore. I have to rely to an informal community to get spare parts from auctions, classified ads, etc. The company has stopped supported the C64 users, but the C64 community is still alive and supports its members very well.
Really, the knowledge that CentOS has good compatibility with RHEL and that I will *never* face the same situation as my did with my C64 makes me a thousand times more willing to buy RHEL if I ever need their enterprise support. Buying RedHat means that if I can't continue running it then I can just revert back to CentOS with little effort.
In this sense, every commercial distributors should seek to support a compatible community-led parallel distro alongside their commercial offering. Community distros that are compatible with commercial versions achieve synergy benefits for both the community and the commercial vendor. Furthermore, companies should not be afraid of losing customers from the community version, as commercial and community distros are meant for very different kinds of users. In the CentOS/RHEL example, the difference between CentOS and RHEL is that with CentOS you are responsible for keeping your machines operational, while with RHEL you can sign a contract and give portions of your responsibility to RedHat. This usually appeals to middle level managers who get to make a choice between distros and have a higher boss to report to in case somethings gets broken. But CentOS, just like Debian, will appeal to techies and entrepreneurs who either know what they are doing or have no one above them to fear getting fired. So, really, these distros target very different markets and very different psychologies of customers.
I just once commited the error of installing Fedora on a server, it was just after RH9 died.
I was buying RH9 for server but when I saw the 350$ price tag of RHEL, I turned to Centos.
I still recomends RHEL, but if RH has a 50-100$ server product, I will be still his happy customer. But right, I'm a Centos user.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
So RH needs money, and making a sub-standard free version and an expensive "Enterprise" version are how they decided to do it. That's fine, but it doesn't mean I have to tie myself to them. They screwed themselves out of my custom -- which wouldn't have been a huge contract, but at least one or two yearly support incidents.
New job and all their linux boxes are various versions of Fedora (except one box which is a debian so old I can't get the ISO to make new disks). Which means I cannot update them since there are no yum repositories for these older versions. I have to make plans to bring up new CentOS boxes and migrate the data so that I can keep them updated.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Seems to me that Jeff Gould is missing the entire point of Linux, RedHat, and GPL in particular. GPL means that the software is FREE for EVERYONE. RedHat sells a service contract to support sites that want to use the free software that RedHat chooses to package and support.
Another way to look at it is that Red Hat save a boatload of money on parts of the OS that it didn't have to pay to develop.
No, you are not the only company doing that. We, too, run our most critical production machines on RHEL, and use CentOS for everything else. That gives us standardization across the entire company, as well as support for our critical boxes. Leaving CentOS alone definitely works to Red Hat's advantage.
CentOS is completely legal because of GPL. There is nothing Red Hat can do to shut it down. People who think that CentOS helps Red Hat are the same people that think illegal p2p music sharing doesn't hurt the recording industry. They don't seem to understand the value of the software itself (nor do they understand the value of a sound recording), which the GPL drives down to $0. Red Hat chose this poison, and they need to live with it.