Johnny Hughes wrote:
I would say the deciding factor should be whether or not you need support. If you do, use RHEL ... if you don't, use CentOS. RedHat doesn't charge for the OS, only for support. If you aren't going to use the support, it would be silly to pay for it.
You can't overlook this fact, though, even if you don't need the support. Back In The Day(tm), people would choose Sun/Oracle/BEA/NSEnt-httpd combo because it looked good to venture capitalists, so in turn got them more funding. As a client services based company, we saw this a lot - corporate decision are not always based on technical merit.
When dealing with a corporate client, there's a sense of security and warm fuzziness that is received when they choose/use/approve RHES for their project. That itself can sell them on using Linux over Windows in a major way, which is really what we're after at the end of the day - we technically could use Debian (sic), it's all linux.
We definitely get our clients into RHES as the platform, but internally we use CentOS here and there - there's no problem using both, you just have to fit the need. By choosing RHES, our clients funnel money upstream to RedHat which helps CentOS indirectly stay alive, by having those SRPMS so readily released/available. Which in turn helps us stay alive, in a small way. :)
-te