Is CentOS Hurting Red Hat?

[mandy]

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.

It's easy to understand what CentOS is. The question is, how much business is it really taking away from Red Hat? The answer: probably more than you think...

full article: http://www.interopnews.com/news/how-badl...d-hat.html

note: We use CentOS 5 and CentOS 4.5 as well as Fedora Core 4 on our servers.  We've used Red Hat or Red Hat based Linux distributions since 1998 (first Red Hat and then Fedora and CentOS).

[jezebel]

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,

Who needs or uses paid support anyways?

[regic]

[quote author=jezebel link=topic=16810.msg66132#msg66132 date=1194395945]

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,

Who needs or uses paid support anyways?
[/quote]

Total times we used Red Hat's support from early '98-late '05: ZERO.