Link Details

If you believe in Linux, you should not being using CentOS.

It's a "free" clone of Red Hat Linux. If you believe in Linux, and you want Linux to stay competitive with Windows, you should buy a license for RHL and send a few dollars to Red Hat, which will spend that money developing GPL software that other people can use for free. Red Hat has always been on the forefront of Linux technology: money spent on RHL licenses supports the free Fedora distribution.

Better buy a Microsoft license to support the road ahead.

That's not fair. And, against basic FOSS principles.

When you buy RHEL, you buy support from RH to assist you in your particular enterprise need, nothing more, nothing less. You're not buying Linux. You are also not "buying" community support. If you want to do the latter, give money to legal or other FOSS organizations.

Basically, buying RHEL is buying into outsourced tech support.

RHEL itself is primarily built off the free work of thousands of Linux developers in a multitude of kernel, libraries and software packages that go into making up any given RHEL distro version. For every hour RH has spent building out the Linux platform, there is 10, 100, or 1000 hours of totally FOSS work out there by nameless others.

In the spirit of the GPL, RH releases modified source that it benefits from back to that community, no questions asked. In fact, you could argue that the RHEL does things that are a negative wrt to FOSS, such as closed-off access to community knowledge to paying RHEL users and alteration of the Linux platform such that it creates an artificial and weak lock-in that the open-source nature of the platform allows you to work around more easily than with a proprietary one.

Yes, RH does a lot for the Linux community: development work, community building, FOSS marketing, and all the way to legal protection. But, that's not a reason to bash CentOS users who want to have a distro that hews close to RH to be able to gain from that pool of expertise, but do not want to pay for licensing and/or don't need RH for support.

And, for the record, I have worked where we used RHEL, and do not currently use either RHEL or CentOS.

To add: RH does not seem to mind CentOS.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3671841

"From the technology side, CentOS broadens the customer base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology," Nick Carr, a product marketing director for RHEL, told internetnews.com. "They are active in the mailing list, and from an engineering viewpoint they certainly assist us in finding problems in the product."