How badly is CentOS hurting Red Hat?
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. For a hint about what's going on, check out this amazing comparative chart on Google Trends.
I used to think most CentOS users were either just fooling around and not really running production servers, or else were using it in small IT shops populated by Linux geeks with a do-it-yourself culture. But a recent conversation with a friend set me straight.
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CentOS in Redhat Subscribers facilities.
A Red Hat FAE "near Austin" has claimed they have seen "sites" (in writing on a LUG list that is probably well known) in their territory, that have a small percentage of Red Hat servers with support and the rest are CentOS. The way he/she/it sounded this arrangement by customers was costing much in the personal pocket book.
The FAE believed the service provided for the Red Hat installations transfered to the CentOS installs rather immediately since they were all sitting on the same racks.
So I guess one could listen to the cries of the salesforce to come to the conclusion it does hurt.
Hasta Le Vista Baby!