Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

While you're clearly aware of CentOS you do seem to be missing its significance. One of the advantages of free licensing is to reduce or eliminate vendor lock-in, and the existence of CentOS reduces lock-in to RHEL essentially to zero - anyone using RHEL can trivially switch to CentOS if they choose not to use Red Hat for support any longer. The differentiation of RHEL is absolutely not in its code, since exactly the same code is available in CentOS. The 'Red Hat difference', and what customers pay for, is purely the support.

Bang. On.