RHEL support levels?

It would be nice if Redhat lowered it's pricing. But it would then undercut their enterprise sales. It all really depends on what will provide them the most profit. I wouldn't hazard a guess on what is best for them.

I've always thought that CentOS benefited Redhat because not everybody can afford to run Redhat supported versions on all their servers.

Say you ran into a situation were you ran a good sized IT department. Say in that IT department you had 'critical' systems that had special regulatory and/or tight turn around times. That is if they had a problem business requirements have you with 24/7 support and 2 hour turn around requirement for a fix. But you had a whole mess of systems that were not nearly so critical.

With the combination of CentOS + Redhat that can provide a cost effective solution were you maintain a more-or-less common platform across all your systems. You had your ass covered in case you got over your head on the critical systems, but did not have to blow your entire budget on all your systems.

If you had to do a mixture of Debian + Redhat systems, for example, then your not just dealing with licensing costs you have the additional overhead of now being forced to support multiple platforms. This raises your documentation costs, training costs, support costs, hardware aquisition costs... everything your IT department does all of a sudden gets more expensive.

If you cannot afford to go all-Redhat then your quite possibly going to be forced to abandon Redhat altogether and go with a third party support channel for Debian.

And, believe me, the costs associated with dealing with multiple platforms often pales in comparison to the cost of dealing with a specific platform's idiosyncrasies uniformly across all your systems. All systems have their issues.

I think that there are a significant number of organizations that run into situations like this. Where the option using CentOS potentially offers a very significant value added to Redhat licensing.