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Comment by awill | Hacker News Reader

Glad this is finally out. I still think Red Hat should just make their builds completely free without a subscription, and charge only for support. CentOS then wouldn't need to exist (and neither would Oracle Linux). That would help it compete with Ubuntu in the startup world.

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The thing is though, Redhat really doesn't need to compete with Ubuntu in the startup world. For the millions of Ubuntu AMIs that run, how much money is Canonical making from them? Compare that to RedHat, a two billion dollar open source company.

Ubuntu was focused too long on markets that simply aren't viable from a fiscal standpoint (See: Ubuntu Phone or much of the excellent desktop work they've done). Redhat meanwhile has been continuing to focus on the enterprise and their revenue continues to grow.

Ubuntu server usage has been growing thanks to AWS AMIs, so actually both have been growing.

I think Ubuntu are just going with a more long term approach.

RedHat just leveraged Oracle compatibility, if you needed Oracle RedHat was and is the only sane choice; but remove the need for Oracle, and Ubuntu is then a very strong competitor.

No-Cost RHEL Developer Subscription now available

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-d...

Also, Desktop Self-support Subscription (1 year) is $49 USD.

Yes but it's really messy. Only 1 host, no 'production' traffic, and if you want to run RHEL in production, you're left with a mix of CentOS/RHEL machines all over. Compare that to startups that use Ubuntu everywhere.

CentOS is maintained by Redhat for awhile now. It's an easy way for them to acquire customers that don't have to go through the trial subscription process.

Here is the press release from 2014 when Redhat took on CentOS officially: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...

CentOS is managed by Redhat, but it's still a separate project. The RHEL 7.3 release that this is based on was released over a month ago.

You can bet your behind that Oracle Linux would still exist.

I believe that CentOS doesn't release sooner when these point releases happen upstream (compared to regular errata updates) may have to do with ensuring packages outside the ones sourced directly from RHEL don't break.

Packages in point releases may sometimes force some packages higher in the dependency tree to be rebuilt, or perhaps may change the dependency chain in some way. Red Hat likely takes care to release only when this doesn't violate stability guarantees for the stuff they support.

If there was no CentOS, I'd say you could end up in a situation where EPEL and IUS (just to mention the most popular - almost indispensable - external repos out there) would be broken for the lastest point release for a while. That would be bad for users.

Red Hat customers are less likely to be using them. After all, if you're going to use unsupported packages, why do it on RHEL instead of CentOS which is mostly the same minus support?

(Also, you can follow the CentOS CR repository if you really want to keep up more closely with upstream RHEL.)

We have both RHEL and CentOS servers (RHEL for production, CentOS for analysis and development). Red Hat is happy to work on issues that we submit even if they happened on one of the CentOS boxes. It's a symbiotic relationship too. I had an issue with a SAS driver and CentOS pushed a fix upstream before RedHat could merge it in.

I find that strange. CentOS is supposed to be downstream. They're not supposed to do anything except compile from Red Hat sources. Are you suggesting that Red Hat fixed the issue, released the source code, and CentOS compiled and published before Red Hat could compile?

From what I recall, a few of the CentOS devs are actually Red Hat employees. Also, I think Red Hat has taken a much more active position in CentOS in the last few years[1].

1: https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/

https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu...

CentOS is essentially official. I'm not exactly sure how the relationship works.

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