[oakwhiz]

On one hand, this might actually improve the state of CentOS. But on the other hand, it's a bit of a conflict of interest for Red Hat to be maintaining the free (as in freedom) version. The real question is, how compatible is the freemium (as in beer) business model with open-source interests?

[koko775]

No, it's a transition from Premium Enterprise Linux to Freemium Enterprise Linux, since the usage of CentOS pretty much made that already the case. They are so compatible that you can purchase support contracts for CentOS by doing an in-place upgrade to RHEL from CentOS for support.

This is more of a strategic move to make Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copies and CentOS-wannabes less compelling: many enterprises that are evaluating Oracle vs. Red Hat will stick to the single-vendor option, and many enterprises that are evaluating Ubuntu vs. CentOS can finally check both checkboxes for "corporate backed and officially endorsed" and "$0 to get started".

[lsc]

>This is more of a strategic move to make Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copies and CentOS-wannabes less compelling: many enterprises that are evaluating Oracle vs. Red Hat will stick to the single-vendor option, and many enterprises that are evaluating Ubuntu vs. CentOS can finally check both checkboxes for "corporate backed and officially endorsed" and "$0 to get started".

Yes. There are customers like me who are never going to give you $500 per server. sorry. it's just not happening.

But, eh, when I need money, you know what I do? I go work for larger companies, maintaining their servers. You know what I tell them to do? I tell them to go buy RHEL; It's a good product. They really do set things up so you don't have to do a major upgrade for ten years. And for the large companies? the $500 isn't a big deal, and the support really is worth something; they have someone to call if I'm not around.

CentOS was perfect for RedHat, because there is a real disadvantage to CentOS, even without the support problems; there's a delay. Nobody who can afford the $500 a machine is going to use CentOS, but it's there and good enough for those of us who can't.

Oracle changed this situation. Oracle will give you CentOS, for free, and is much faster at the re-compile. Now, I don't use it because I hate Oracle, but using Oracle has been the rational choice for some time now. (And I like RedHat. I mean, as much as you can like a company. Vs. Oracle? I am really rooting for RedHat here.)

My hope here is that RHEL will improve the compile-time of CentOS to where it's as good as Oracle.

[TallGuyShort]

I question my own understanding here, because I still don't think I grok all the motivation for this action (on both sides), but I don't think it's a conflict of interest. Nobody buys RHEL because they can't get it anywhere else. They buy it because it's what Red Hat officially supports. Or they buy it for one of the add-on projects that you have to pay for, like Satellite, etc. I don't think any of that changes with the merger. Just my 2c, though, because again - I feel like I'm missing something.

[dec0dedab0de]

RedHat, already is free as in freedom, thats why CentOS is allowed to exist. They're just not Free as in Free beer. The corporations who pay for RHEL aren't going to suddenly cancel all of their support contracts.

[nav1]

What's the worst thing that could happen? CentOS is literally RHEL with the Red Hat branding removed. Even if Red Hat decided to cancel the CentOS project for some reason, the RHEL source code will still be available.

[koenigdavidmj]

The worst that could happen would be that Red Hat would stop shipping sources for all the BSD/MIT/etc licensed bits, and be as difficult as possible for GPL sources (written offer, valid for three years, and making CentOS pay for the media costs, and then play stupid legal games with the requirement that it be `on a medium customarily used for software interchange').

They don't strictly have to put all the sources in a conveniently compilable format on FTP servers.

[makomk]

Oh, there's worse things Red Hat can do to block access to GPL source. For example, technically they only have to provide source to their customers, and there's nothing in the GPL that stops them terminating the contracts of any customers who distribute that source code and closing off their access to updates.

In a way they're already doing that with kernel source; the actual broken-out patches applied to the kernel are only available to customers and they're contractually obliged not to distribute them otherwise their contract will be terminated and they'll lose access to support, software and security updates and the right to run RHEL at all.

[lukeschlather]

Have they actually done that to any customer?

That's a pretty novel interpretation of the GPL, and I doubt that it would hold up in court. Reading through the GPLv2 I can't see anything in there that even suggests Red Hat would be within their rights to do that.

[matt__rose]

They still provide all the sources, as well as easy means to build them ( a source rpm ). This is far more than what the GPL requires them to do. What they don't distribute is the srpm with all of the patches neatly broken out by bug number and CVE (if applicable).

It makes it harder to figure out what sources came from RH, and what are vanilla kernel sources, but there's nothing in the GPL that says you have to detail the provenance of every line of source code distributed

[TallGuyShort]

Citation needed on the second paragraph? I'm sure that's a GPL violation.