

Red Hat’s CentOS “acquisition” good for both sides, but ‘ware the Jabberwock - dsberkholz
http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/01/10/red-hats-centos-acquisition-good-for-both-sides-but-ware-the-jabberwock/

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epoelke
I see this as a good thing. Seems to me that we are basically getting back
RedHat releases pre-RHEL. Fedora is great for the desktop, but I really like
"Enterprise Linux" on the server side. I basically abandoned RedHat after the
RHEL/Fedora split. Went to Gentoo (to unstable at the time) for a bit, Ubuntu,
then CentOS during the late 4.x releases. I will pretty much stick with CentOS
from here on out, why? Well enterprise customers who what support can get it,
people who don't can easily use it, and those that don't want to pay now but
know they will need to later will have an easy path forward. And its nice to
have a major release that will remain stable and patched for a 7 year haul.
Some folks seem to be concerned like this is a bad thing, RedHat has been a
model citizen for open source. The amount of work they do in backporting fixes
for people who need to remain on a version for whatever reason is huge. On top
of the fact that they make most (all?) of their own software freely available
as well. There is really no advantage for them to do anything to CentOS other
than keep it doing what its doing, but faster.

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garretraziel
To those wondering, I think that Red Hat doesn't make that much money from
SELLING RHEL. It's the support, certifications and those things that are
making Red Hat's budget. So CentOS and RHEL aren't really competing products.
But Red Hat can now offer support even to CentOS customers.

(I'm Red Hat employee.)

~~~
dijit
I love you.

just... throwing that out there.

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schnevets
I don't see why so many people think this deal is such a head scratcher. Red
Hat is shifting away from pure support to a suite of cloud services. People
are more likely to choose them if they are already using a Red Hat platform.
This is especially useful if you're obliged to maintain a free version.

The moment you enter the blade business, you stop caring if someone is giving
away your razors.

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lsc
I wonder what this is going to do to the Centos-Xen[1] project?

[1][http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/20/welcome-to-the-
xen4...](http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/20/welcome-to-the-
xen4centos6-project-first-release/)

~~~
cwyers
RHEL specifically mentioned it in the FAQ:

[http://community.redhat.com/centos-
faq/#_what_this_means_for...](http://community.redhat.com/centos-
faq/#_what_this_means_for_centos)

"The CentOS Project will expand its mission to provide additional open source
technology-specific variant editions of the core operating system. Such
editions will be capable of serving as a foundation for multiple,
complementary cloud/virtualization projects. A current example is the
Xen4CentOS project, which provides the components required to use CentOS 6 as
a Xen host. Future examples will likely include variants to provide the
virtualization component needs for OpenStack and oVirt, and variants providing
hardware support and component updates for web hosters."

So they're publicly committing to continue to support that.

~~~
lsc
ah. thanks. I missed that.

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oakwhiz
On one hand, this might actually improve the state of CentOS. But on the other
hand, it's a bit of a conflict of interest for Red Hat to be maintaining the
free (as in freedom) version. The real question is, how compatible is the
freemium (as in beer) business model with open-source interests?

~~~
koko775
No, it's a transition from Premium Enterprise Linux to Freemium Enterprise
Linux, since the usage of CentOS pretty much made that already the case. They
are so compatible that you can purchase support contracts for CentOS by doing
an in-place upgrade to RHEL from CentOS for support.

This is more of a strategic move to make Oracle Linux and the other RHEL
copies and CentOS-wannabes less compelling: many enterprises that are
evaluating Oracle vs. Red Hat will stick to the single-vendor option, and many
enterprises that are evaluating Ubuntu vs. CentOS can finally check both
checkboxes for "corporate backed and officially endorsed" and "$0 to get
started".

~~~
lsc
>This is more of a strategic move to make Oracle Linux and the other RHEL
copies and CentOS-wannabes less compelling: many enterprises that are
evaluating Oracle vs. Red Hat will stick to the single-vendor option, and many
enterprises that are evaluating Ubuntu vs. CentOS can finally check both
checkboxes for "corporate backed and officially endorsed" and "$0 to get
started".

Yes. There are customers like me who are never going to give you $500 per
server. sorry. it's just not happening.

But, eh, when I need money, you know what I do? I go work for larger
companies, maintaining their servers. You know what I tell them to do? I tell
them to go buy RHEL; It's a good product. They really do set things up so you
don't have to do a major upgrade for ten years. And for the large companies?
the $500 isn't a big deal, and the support really is worth something; they
have someone to call if I'm not around.

CentOS was perfect for RedHat, because there is a real disadvantage to CentOS,
even without the support problems; there's a delay. Nobody who can afford the
$500 a machine is going to use CentOS, but it's there and good enough for
those of us who can't.

Oracle changed this situation. Oracle will give you CentOS, for free, and is
much faster at the re-compile. Now, I don't use it because I hate Oracle, but
using Oracle has been the rational choice for some time now. (And I like
RedHat. I mean, as much as you can like a company. Vs. Oracle? I am really
rooting for RedHat here.)

My hope here is that RHEL will improve the compile-time of CentOS to where
it's as good as Oracle.

