[bubblethink]

>CentOS Stream is parallel to existing CentOS builds

So why does regular CenOS exist in this day and age given its semi-official status under the RH umbrella ? Why doesn't RH just let people use RHEL without support ? Isn't it a massive waste of everyone's resources to rebuild everything and remove the trademarks? This seems like a more interesting future for CentOS to have as something different from baseline RHEL.

[simias]

I always assumed that it was a marketing decision, RedHat don't want people (especially the corporate type who buy a ton of servers but might not know the small details) to know that "RedHat, but free" is an alternative. Instead we have "wait, but the vendor said that the software ran on RedHat, what's this CentOS thing? Better not take the risk."

RedHat is the household name that everybody knows, it probably makes sense to preserve it for the project that actually makes them money.

From the perspective of a 3rd party making software targeting RHEL it's simpler as well. I don't want to have to deal with clueless users installing an unsupported OS to run my software and then asking me for support for things like "our CD drive is not supported" or "how can we patch this security vulnerability". I've enough work supporting my software, I don't want to deal with the client's clueless sysadmin on top of it.

[jerf]

"Trademark" is the key word. If RedHad permits things out into the market with their trademarks all over them that they did not sell, then they are at risk of losing their trademark. Remember the primary purpose of a trademark is to identify your products as yours, and not let anyone else identify their products as yours.

It's a contradiction in legal terms to have a trademark that is open source and anyone can use, and legal system's resolution is to declare your trademark isn't a trademark after all.

[bubblethink]

You are misinterpreting what I said. I'm not talking about someone else impersonating RHEL. Canonical has no issue with its OS out in the market. RHEL could just be free to use (with updates but without other support) if they choose. This is how it used to be before it became RHEL anyway. Hence, CentOS was created as an outsider effort. Nowadays, CentOS is half inside RH, which is why the distinction is a bit silly.

However, upon thinking a bit more, their current strategy still makes business sense since RHEL and CentOS are silos. While the sets of users that pay for support and the ones that don't are different, if they started giving updates for free, it reduces their bargaining power in general and more so when time comes to renew support. Right now, if you stop paying for support, you cannot use RHEL any more and it won't get updates.

[jerf]

"RHEL could just be free to use (with updates but without other support) if they choose."

But not with that name.

Centos is as close as it can get.

[bubblethink]

I don't see the argument. Trademark has nothing to do with money. They don't lose their trademark if they give away something gratis. Canonical doesn't lose their trademarks just because you can get Ubuntu without paying them. Before RHEL, there was Red Hat Linux which was free to use.

[russh]

That is so very incorrect. Way back in the beginning, they offered RHEL without support but with updates. At some point they started charging for access and eventually they raised the prices high enough that I couldn't afford to use it any more.

[hannasanarion]

Google is free to use, that doesn't mean that just anybody can take their trademark.

Trademarks have nothing to do with whether something is traded for money or not.

[cwyers]

Red Hat bought out CentOS now. They own CentOS. There would be no trademark dillution from a legal standpoint if they used their own trademark for their free version of the distro.

[tw04]

Because they don't want to deal with someone who goes 5 years without support, runs into a hard system down situation, then tries to buy support on the spot.

While they can absolutely insist the customer pay support back 5 years, the political fallout is always ugly.

[peterwwillis]

> Why doesn't RH just let people use RHEL without support ?

They do: it's called CentOS. CentOS was acquired by RedHat in 2014, keeping an independent governance body. But the reason RedHat didn't release itself as open source was Oracle. They were rebuilding RHEL and reselling it, so RedHat closed up its process and did the bare minimum required to comply with the GPL. Brian Stevens confirmed it. So now RedHat exists in order to make money off a supported product [and fend off competitors [and enforce trademarks]], and CentOS exists to keep control over the open-source spin-off of the same. So if you want the real deal certified supported enterprise distro, you have to pay for it, and if you want an uncertified slightly-not-the-same open-source alternative, that's free.

[jacques_chester]

It's worth noting that the existential threat has eased a lot for Red Hat. Openshift is growing as alternative revenue stream but has a long way to go before it replaces RHEL subscriptions. But now that IBM is keeping the lights on, Red Hat has at least a decade of breathing room it didn't have before. It can afford to loosen the RHEL reigns a bit.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we compete against Red Hat in a number of ways.

[yrro]

The crucial difference between CentOS and RHEL is the speed of security updates. While CentOS is building a new RHEL point release there are no security updates!

This makes me unhappy to connect a CentOS machine to a production network, let alone put it on the Internet.

In addition the metadata that lets you install only security updates or bugfixes is not present in CentOS.

[_ph_]

Red Hat is selling RH to gain their revenue, but they know that they have a limited audience which is willing to pay for their services. The rest of the Linux world expects Linux to be free. So instead of pushing them towards other distributions they keep those in the Red Hat universe by supporting the "free" versions of RH Linux.

It also makes it easier for any open source author to test their software on Red Hat, as there is always a free version available.

[rb808]

Oracle Java is practically identical to OpenJDK Java too. I'm not sure if its branding or legal, but the big companies like it that way.

[_-david-_]

OpenJDK is based on Oracle Java. CentOS on the other hand is based on RHEL. That would be like OpenJDK being based on Oracle Java.

[JetSpiegel]

> That would be like OpenJDK being based on Oracle Java.

This days it's the opposite, Oracle is "selling" a forked version of their own product.