Re: [PLUG] CentOS

CentOS exists because Red Hat made its money from large customers and lost money on small software developers. So, they did not want to deal directly with small software vendors. Let me tell you my story.

At YottaDB, with our customers being sizeable institutions running mission critical applications on our software, I bought an entry-level subscription which would let us build and test on an official RH platform and tool chain. When I tried to renew my subscription, RH did not want to renew my subscription, but instead shunted me off to a crappy third party reseller that took YottaDB's money but did not communicate the renewal to RH. It so happened that I was connected with Jim Whitehurst, then CEO of RH, as both of us had been fellow panelists on a Linux Foundation panel discussion several years before. I e-mailed Jim just days before our subscription was about to run out, and that got things straightened out. With CentOS, the idea was that RH did not have to deal with small software developers, but could make the platform and tool chain available to them to develop applications used by institutions that would then pay Red Hat money for very little beyond the brand name.

The genius of Red Hat was in figuring out how to make a FOSS brand that companies would pay for, while minimizing the associated costs. This is also something that IBM has traditionally done well at.

Regards

– Bhaskar

On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 1:44 PM Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 12:30 PM Charlie Li via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> More so, institutions often times have decision makers who are not the
> most technically inclined; they would be far more comfortable with
> something that has at least an illusion of paid/enterprise support, even
> if technically inferior or that their choice will bite them later.
> CentOS has that illusion going for them (because RHEL exists).
>

Yeah, I think the whole selling-point of CentOS was that it was
near-identical to RHEL but free. That makes it great as a
test/development platform, or for production for cheapskates. In
theory binaries that run on one would run on the other, and so on.

I still haven't read up on the gory details of the change - I never
used CentOS or RHEL myself. However, I can see the appeal of that
sort of LTS platform for enterprise solutions, especially in more
traditional IT organizations.

--
Rich
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