John Nall wrote:

> This is the first time that I have heard of Centos.  I went to their 
> website and read about it.  I have to say that it seems to me that they 
> are just grabbing Redhat binaries and giving them another name, since 
> their FAQ is full of all sorts of references to Redhat (which they will 
> not refer to by name -- "North American distributor???").  Seems kind of 
> sleazy to me, to be honest.  Redhat has always allowed you to download 
> their binaries free.

No this is definitely not what they're doing.

RedHat no longer distributes a free OS, they only distribute RedHat 
Enterprise versions (there is more than one version) commercially now.

RedHat no longer makes a desktop free desktop distro either.  They 
graciously host and support the Fedora Core project, which took the RH 
9.0 code and continued it.  Fedora Core 4 is out, if that gives you a 
feel for how long things have been this way -- you're at least a year 
behind!

RedHat Enterprise is a commercial-only product, but the SOURCE code is 
still free under the GPL.  RedHat has been dedicated to that and still is.

So, CentOS just compiles the already published source for people who 
don't need/want to pay for RHEL versions.

Typically companies pay for RHEL versions, for whatever reasons... 
(support, "guarantees", whatever... business doesn't always make sense., 
while more savvy companies grab a copy of CentOS, WhiteBox Linux, or any 
of the other RHEL source-derived packages.  The codes the same, either 
way, and clueful CIO's know this and use it to a hefty competitive 
advantage, taking the risk that if they need RH's support, they won't 
have it.  Thus, they hires really clever sysadmins to maintain their stuff.

Nothing about CentOS or WhiteBox Linux bothers RedHat themselves in the 
slightest... they're still firmly entrenched in the GPL, which means 
they publish their source -- if you've got the time, energy, and friends 
to help you, you can create your own distro from it.  Like the folks 
that started CentOS did.

Nate

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