[macksd]

>> I think I understand RHEL and I think I understand Fedora, but I never got the appeal of CentOS.

A lot of the appeal of RHEL is being the de facto industry standard. CentOS also gives you that, just without the support contract, which many organizations just replace with their own capable admins. People may want the stability but don't otherwise benefit from the pricing model.

What actually never made sense to me was Red Hat officially embracing the CentOS project. A free clone will inevitably happen because that's exactly what the GPL intended. Red Hat has made lots of money by adding incremental work to a large body of other people's work. They make their money delivering value to their customers who do value faster patches and support, but the source code must remain free for everyone else. I'm not really sure what anyone, Red Hat or the community, got out of CentOS current "official" status.

[alphager]

If you try out CentOs and it doesn't work, there's a chance you try Suse, Ubuntu, Arch etc.

If you try CentOS and it does work, there's a chance you grow large enough to be able to pay for Redhat.

CentOS was inevitable, might as well go for scenario 2 than 1.

[macksd]

Makes sense. But what changed in practice that made scenario 2 more likely?

[angelbar]

mostly... Official support