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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.
"Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS?"
um...because they have too?!
"open source" look it up on wikipedia...on second thought...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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
Yeah when I was doing a Computer related degree in College they used CentOS because of that fact. The thing is you're more likely to encounter RHEL than Debian, Ubuntu and such for server work. They exploited the fact that CentOS was a free version of RHEL and now RHEL has about 20-30 more people with college degrees that have been introduced to their work.
Myself I've used Ubuntu series of Linux on my home machine because its better for desktops but if I were to run a server I'd probably choose CentOS for myself (or a small business), RHEL if I had a big budget in a major company.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
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"
Redhat's legal department confirmed what I had already believed (after all, my boss insisted I found out for sure, which makes perfect sense given the consequences). Redhat, like all other kernel/OSS developers owns copyrights on the code they have produced, but the code is licensed under the GPL. In fact, Redhat, being the great OSS supporter that they are, licenses all of their in house code under the GPL. Their sales department, unfortunately, is run by complete morons that don't understand simple things like the difference between trademarks, copyrights, and licenses. Since Redhat owns its trademark and, in order to preserve that trademark, must protect it, selling Redhat without following their licensing terms is illegal. In house use, however, is fair use.
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'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."
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.
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.
> You don't protect trademarks, you lose them, the end. And you know it.
You don't quite lose them. What you do lose is the ability to claim damages due to dilution. You still get to pursue blatant infringement -- Kimberly-Clark could still sue your cojones off if you sold paper products called "Kleenex".
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.