[ghshephard]

"Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market "

Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company.

Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available for Centos, (2) No Support, (3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks.

Centos had everything else.

[nitrogen]

(3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks.

This is evil, because the law is supposed to allow referential use of trademarks as a fair use.

Otherwise, RedHat's existence is highly beneficial to Linux.

[blueskin_]

That's a self-imposed policy on CentOS' side, not something they were forced to do.

[tedchs]

Yes, and the other big advantage of RHEL in enterprisey environments is their compatibility certifications with other vendors (e.g. Oracle Database).