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."

Comments

Re:nope, doesn't hurt RH

[Thwomp]

Sorry I modded you down by accident. For some reasons the drop downs aren't working in firefox at the moment. This is the only way I know of undoing it. Cheers.

I just can't trust RedHat

[The Breeze]

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.

Re:nope, doesn't hurt RH

[Zeio]

I agree with the "not hurting."

We CentOS users generally buy at least one copy of the fully supported RHEL and file bugs and work like crazy to get the CentOS product to be better by working with RedHat on their bugzilla and on their OS. If you "aren't very good with Linux/*nix" and you buy RHEL you are getting a **lot** of testing and bug squashing by not only RedHat but also all the CentOS folks. Without CentOS, people would be defecting from RedHat to things like SuSE and other distros in my estimation.