Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 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.
"I'm pretty sure RedHat hate CentOS."
1. No, we don't. At least, not most of us -- because most of us actually *understand* the business we're in. That's why we're making all this nice money. If we did hate CentOS, we could make it awfully difficult for them in any number of ways -- delaying updates, hiding marks and making them play "where's Waldo" every release, that sort of thing.
2. The "coy mumbo jumbo" about the upstream vendor has to do with trademark protection, not hate. We don't want "Red Hat" to turn into "Kleenex".
3. Here's a question: why is there no CentOS equivalent based on SuSE products? Think about it.
4. A lot of the significant people in the CentOS community are actually important and respected members of the Fedora community as well. That way, Red Hat benefits from the work of the more savvy CentOS users. That's how open source works, you see.
5. It's Red Hat, with a space. Not RedHat. Get it right, or we'll send you a cease-and-desist letter. (I'm kidding. Probably.)
This is a pretty bad comparison. The relationship between SUSE and openSUSE is much closer to that of Red Hat and Fedora than of Red Hat and CentOS. openSUSE is a fully Novell-sponsored initiative that basically functions as a testing sandbox for the enterprise OS, much like Fedora serves as the base for much RHEL functionality. CentOS is a third-party effort with no official backing from Red Hat whatsoever.