[Zathrus1]

CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL. While it's rare, there are some bugs that creep in during that process. It also doesn't have a few other things that RHEL does - mainly the -supplemental repo (closed source 3rd party software, the most important of which is probably Oracle jdk in rpm form), a working yum-security module, and a slightly different update mechanism (both are yum, but if you are creating some mass deployment system then having subscription-manager is important; this is really edge case-y though).

And to be very, very clear - Red Hat does not support CentOS. Some of the CentOS devs are paid by Red Hat, but if you open a support ticket for it it will be closed very quickly. You cannot pay Red Hat for commercial support of CentOS in any way.

[joombaga]

To invert the question then: Why, now, would I choose CentOS over RHEL with this new free development license?

[krylon]

You can put CentOS on production machines. If I understand the news correctly, the free developer license only applies to ... well, developer machines.

[rilindo]

You would choose CentOS if you need to run enterprise-level software (example, Oracle), but you can't pony up the operational money to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux licenses on your server fleet.

[caf]

If you can afford Oracle licenses, RHEL licenses are a rounding error.

[hrez]

Oracle supported way would be to use Oracle Linux for that.

[simplemath]

You wouldn't. Seems like the whole idea.

[ptrincr]

Are there no limitations at all with this then? No limit to the number of machines it can be deployed on? Any stipulations about it being for development only purposes?

Reading the article suggests it's developer only and so for low cost production deployments, Centos is still much cheaper(free).

[simplemath]

Presumably if you dev in rhel or particularly rhel/.net, you'd want to run the same in prod.

[hulahoof]

For the first few years perhaps not to force current systems to move in order to keep receiving updates?